Lincoln (41 page)

By fall, events in Kansas and in Washington made it necessary for Lincoln and his advisers to be especially alert. In the hope of ending the turmoil and bloodshed in the Kansas Territory, President Buchanan, along with many other Democrats, favored the speedy admission of Kansas as a state, and in February the territorial government ordered an election for a constitutional convention. It was, as Lincoln remarked, “the most exquisite farce ever enacted.” Free-soil voters, certain that the election was rigged to favor the proslavery faction, stayed at home, and only about 2,200 out of 9,000 registered voters participated. Nevertheless, the delegates assembled in Lecompton in September and October, drew up a constitution, and submitted it for the approval of the President and Congress. A proslavery document, it guaranteed not merely that the two hundred or so slaves already in Kansas would remain in bondage but that their offspring should also be slaves. The constitution could not be amended for seven years. Against the advice of both President Buchanan and Robert J. Walker, whom he had appointed territorial governor, the convention provided for a referendum not on the constitution itself but only on the question of whether more slaves could be introduced into the state. Eager to have the Kansas crisis finally settled, Buchanan, ignoring his previous pledges, approved this Lecompton Constitution and recommended it to the Congress.

Douglas decided to oppose it. He knew he was facing a strenuous reelection campaign in Illinois, where Lincoln almost certainly would be his opponent. He had lost much strength by his advocacy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and his endorsement of the Dred Scott decision, even though tepid, had cost him more. Support of the patently proslavery Lecompton Constitution would weaken him even further. As one of Trumbull’s correspondents wrote: “if Kansas is admited under the Lecompton Constitution, there would not be a grease spot left of Douglas in Illinois.” Aside from political considerations, Douglas felt that the document subverted his cardinal principle, popular sovereignty, because it denied the inhabitants of the Kansas territory
the right to choose their own form of government. He vowed to “make the greatest effort of his life in opposition to this juggle.” Breaking with President Buchanan, Douglas led the fight in the Senate against the Lecompton Constitution, denouncing it as a “flagrant violation of popular rights in Kansas,” and an outrage on the “fundamental principles of liberty upon which our institutions rest.” He made it clear that his objection was to the process by which the constitution was adopted rather than to particular provisions of that document. On the slavery referendum he professed neutrality. “It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided,” he told the Senate, adding a statement that Lincoln would repeatedly quote out of context: “I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.”

Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton, and to the President, delighted Republicans. Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the
New York Tribune,
which was thought to have between 5,000 and 10,000 readers in Illinois, announced that Douglas’s course was not merely right but “conspicuously, courageously, eminently so.” Greeley began conferring with the senator on ways to defeat the measure, as did former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Massachusetts Republican Nathaniel P. Banks, and Benjamin F. Wade, the abolitionist senator from Ohio. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts believed that Douglas was about to move into the Republican party, where he would be “of more weight to our cause than any other ten men in the country.”

Lincoln’s initial reaction to what he called the
“rumpus”
among the Democrats over Lecompton was to urge Republicans to stand clear of the quarrel, because both Buchanan and Douglas were in the wrong. He was convinced that Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton was only a trick to deceive unwary Republicans. Douglas and his friends were “like boys who have set a bird-trap” and were now “watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under.”

But by late December he began to fear that Greeley and other Eastern Republicans were walking into the trap. “What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” he angrily asked Senator Trumbull. “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?” During the spring Lincoln’s suspicions increased as Eastern Republicans continued to praise Douglas’s heroic, and ultimately successful, opposition to Lecompton. Further reinforcement came when Herndon, making a long-planned pleasure trip to Washington and the Northeast, reported that prominent Eastern Republicans favored Douglas’s reelection and that Horace Greeley thought Illinois Republicans were fools to oppose him.

Resentful of outside interference, Illinois Republicans spurned the suggestion that they ought to drop Lincoln and back Douglas for reelection. “God forbid,” exploded Jesse K. Dubois,
“Are our friends crazy?”
Such a shift was impossible, Herndon angrily wrote Greeley. “Douglas’ abuse of us
as Whigs—as Republicans—as men in society, and as individuals, has been so slanderous—dirty—low—long, and
continuous,
that we cannot soon forgive and
can never forget”

Lincoln and his friends were also troubled by the possibility that former Democrats might defect, as they had in 1855, and back another candidate for the Senate. The most likely possibility was “Long John” Wentworth of Chicago, the erratic but enormously popular former Democratic congressman who had broken with Douglas over Kansas-Nebraska and had recently been elected Republican mayor of Chicago by the largest majority ever given in that city. Wentworth probably did have vague ambitions for the senatorship, but he wisely recognized that Lincoln was the choice of most Republicans and took no steps to make himself available. But Democratic newspapers, hoping to divide their opponents, touted his candidacy, claiming that he said Lincoln could never be elected and that he intended to pack the state convention with delegates “pledged to vote for him through thick and thin.” Some of Lincoln’s backers—notably Judd, who had repeatedly battled Wentworth in Chicago—took the threat seriously, as did Lincoln himself.

To prevent any erosion of Republican solidarity, Lincoln’s friends began carefully planning for the fall elections, which would choose eighty-seven members of the next legislature. (There were thirteen holdover members of the state senate.) Though Lincoln himself remained curiously passive, his supporters in county convention after county convention passed resolutions declaring that he was their first, last, and only choice for senator. Then they arranged, for only the second time in American history, to have a party’s state convention nominate a senatorial candidate. The procedure was so unprecedented that it attracted much attention, and a Philadelphia editor called this “dangerous innovation” a “revolutionary effort to destroy the true intent and spirit of the constitution.” Its purpose, however, was much less grand. The nomination was designed, as Lincoln said, “more for the object of closing down upon this everlasting croaking about Wentworth, than anything else.” Equally important, it was intended to give a clear signal to Eastern Republicans like Greeley that Illinois Republicans would never unite behind Douglas.

When the Republican state convention assembled in the statehouse at Springfield on June 16, the outcome was prearranged. Without dissent, the delegates adopted a noncontroversial platform Browning had drafted and nominated candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education. Then they turned to the real business of the meeting. When Judd and the Chicago delegation brought in a banner inscribed
COOK COUNTY IS FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN
, the delegates exploded in applause. A member from Peoria moved to change the motto to “Illinois is for Abraham Lincoln,” and the convention went wild. Unanimously the delegates voted that Abraham Lincoln was “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.” It was, Herndon
reported, “a grand affair,” and the Republicans “all felt like exploding—not with gass [sic], but with electric bolts, shivering what we struck.”

That evening, at eight o’clock, Lincoln gave his acceptance speech. He had been thinking about it for several weeks, drafting sentences and paragraphs on stray pieces of paper and the backs of envelopes, storing them in his tall hat. Eventually he wrote out the entire speech with great care, closely revising every sentence. As long as possible, he kept the contents to himself, and when Dubois asked what he was writing, Lincoln replied gruffly: “It’s something you may see or hear some time, but I’ll not let you see it now.” After he had finished the final draft, he read it aloud, first to Herndon and then to a dozen or so of his other close advisers. By the evening of the convention every word was fixed in his tenacious memory, and he had no need to refer to his manuscript when he delivered it.

In conscious imitation of the opening of Daniel Webster’s celebrated reply to Robert Hayne, he began:

The “house divided” quotation was one familiar to virtually everybody in a Bible-reading, churchgoing state like Illinois; it appeared in three of the Gospels. Lincoln himself had used the image as early as 1843 in urging party solidarity among the Whigs. The idea behind the metaphor as he now used it, that slavery and freedom were incompatible, had been a standard part of the abolitionists’ argument for decades, and in an 1852 speech Edmund Quincy, the Massachusetts abolitionist, had used the house-divided quotation
to predict the death of slavery. More recently Southern apologists, such as George Fitzhugh, also argued that the United States must become all slave or all free.

Lincoln had been thinking about this house-divided theme for several years. As early as 1855, after his first defeat for the Senate, he raised the question with a Kentucky correspondent: “Can we, as a nation, continue together
permanently—forever
—half slave, and half free?” The next year during the Frémont campaign he several times announced “his opinion that our government could not last—part slave and part free.” In December 1857 he drafted a speech arguing that the controversy over the Lecompton Constitution simply diverted attention from “the true magnitude of the slavery element in this nation,” which was dividing political parties and even churches along sectional lines.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,
” he concluded then. “I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free whether this shall be an entire slave nation,
is
the issue before us.”

In using almost identical words now, Lincoln was setting the stage for the longer second section of his address, designed to show that Douglas was part of a dangerous plot to nationalize slavery. As proof of that conspiracy Lincoln evidenced first Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill opening all the national territory to slavery, which had upset a long-standing national consensus. Then he noted how President Franklin Pierce had pushed the bill to make it law. Next President James Buchanan, in his inaugural address, fervently urged citizens to accept the still unannounced opinion of the Supreme Court on the extension of slavery, and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney immediately afterward ruled that all congressional legislation restricting slavery in the territories was invalid. Unlike most other Republican leaders, Lincoln did not blame these measures extending slavery on the “Slave Power”—a phrase that he carefully avoided throughout the campaign—but attributed them to the Northern Democrats. He admitted that “we cannot absolutely
know”
that these Democratic leaders were in a conspiracy. “But,” he said, using an image familiar to every Illinois farmer who had ever raised a barn, “when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James [i.e., Douglas, Pierce, Taney, and Buchanan], for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all these tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and... not a piece too many or too few,” it was impossible not to believe that the four workmen had worked from a common plan or blueprint.