Lincoln (45 page)

In his reply Lincoln was in good voice and in high spirits; he seemed to thrive on campaigning rather than being exhausted from it. Sensing that his audience was on his side, he appeared almost joyful as he rebutted Douglas’s charges, most of which, he noted, had “previously been delivered and put in print.” Douglas had been guilty of slandering the Founding Fathers, for “the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” Similarly he had misrepresented Lincoln’s views on race, because there was no conflict whatever between his view that it was impossible to produce perfect social and political equality between black and white races and his insistence that “the inferior races” were equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He taunted Douglas on his repeated failure to repudiate the alleged Republican resolutions of 1854, which he had tried ever since the Ottawa debate to attach to Lincoln. In constantly reusing this “stale fraud” he was like “the fisherman’s wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels.” Said she “when she was asked, ‘What was to be done with him?’
‘Take the eels out and set him again.

Then, becoming serious, he again charged (“without questioning motives at all”) that Douglas was part of a plan to make slavery national. To do this Douglas was willing to distort history and to rewrite the story of the American Revolution; he was “going back to the era of our liberty and independence, and, so far as in him lies, muzzling the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return.” “He is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Lincoln continued, borrowing a phrase from Henry Clay; “he is ... eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty” in order to perpetuate slavery. Soon he would even extend it by making “a grab for the territory of poor
Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands.”

At Quincy, a week later, each candidate went over the familiar arguments, and neither introduced many new ideas. Not until nearly the end of Lincoln’s opening speech did he again state what he believed was the fundamental issue of the campaign: “the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong.” Republicans believed that it was “a moral, a social and a political wrong,” and wanted to limit its spread. The Democratic party, on the other hand, did not think slavery was a wrong, and Douglas, its “leading man,” had “the high distinction, so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong.”

Douglas, in reply, defended his record and once again charged that Lincoln held “one set of principles in the Abolition counties, and a different and contradictory set in the other counties.” He called the Dred Scott decision one from which “there is no appeal this side of Heaven,” and charged that Lincoln was stirring up opposition to the Supreme Court and “stimulating the passions of men to resort to violence and to mobs instead of to the law.” In the only new gambit in the debate, he suggested that Lincoln’s plan to contain slavery was really genocidal, because it meant confining slaves to land where they could not support themselves; thus by putting slavery on the course of ultimate extinction he really meant “extinguishing the negro race.” “This,” he gibed, “is the humane and Christian remedy that he proposes for the great crime of slavery.” Earnestly Douglas besought his listeners to return to the basic principle of self-government. If they recognized, as the fathers of the nation had always recognized, that “this Republic can exist forever divided into free and slave States,” Americans could get on with their “great mission” of “filling up our prairies, clearing our wildernesses and building cities, towns, railroads and other internal improvements, and thus make this the asylum of the oppressed of the whole earth.”

Lincoln in his rebuttal seized upon Douglas’s admission that his “system of policy in regard to the institution of slavery
contemplates that it shall last forever.
” That, he said, proved what he had been arguing all along about the Democratic candidate.

On the day after the Quincy debate, both Lincoln and Douglas got aboard the
City of Louisiana
and sailed down the Mississippi River to Alton, for the final encounter of the campaign. Looking haggard with fatigue, Douglas opened the debate on October 15 in a voice so hoarse that in the early part of his speech he could scarcely be heard. After briefly reviewing the standard arguments over which he and Lincoln had differed since the beginning of the campaign, he made the peculiar decision to devote most of his speech to a detailed defense of his course on Lecompton. He concluded with a
rabble-rousing attack on the racial views he attributed to Republicans and an announcement “that the signers of the Declaration of Independence ... did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race,” when they issued that document.

In his reply Lincoln said he was happy to ignore Douglas’s long account of his feud with the Buchanan administration; he felt like the put-upon wife in an old jestbook, who stood by as her husband struggled with a bear, saying, “Go it, husband!—Go it bear!” Once again he went through his standard answers to Douglas’s charges against him and the Republican party. Recognizing that at Alton he was addressing “an audience, having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on,” he tried to explain why it was so important to keep slavery out of Kansas and other national territories. This was land needed “for an outlet for our surplus population”; this was land where “white men may find a home”; this was “an outlet for
free white people every where,
the world over—in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”

And that brought him again to what he perceived as “the real issue in this controversy,” which once more he defined as a conflict “on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery
as a wrong,
and of another class that
does not
look upon it as a wrong.” Rising to the oratorical high point in the entire series of debates, he told the Alton audience: “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. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

With a brief rejoinder by Douglas, the debates were ended. After that both candidates made a few more speeches to local rallies, but everybody realized that the campaign was over, and the decision now lay with the voters.

It was hard to predict what that decision would be. Even an extremely conscientious citizen who made a point of attending all seven debates—or, more probably, a voter who attended one of the debates and read the detailed accounts the newspaper carried of the other six—might find it hard to make up his mind. In terms of debating skills he would have to judge the two speakers as about equal, Douglas giving a much more impressive performance at the start but Lincoln gaining in fluency and flexibility as the campaign progressed. Neither speaker exhibited the purest debating technique, enunciating a position, logically developing its implications, and systematically refuting the arguments of his opponent.

The voter would have to give both Lincoln and Douglas passing marks for observing the amenities of debate, though there was a certain amount of horseplay. Douglas claimed that in his New Salem days Lincoln “could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together”—a charge that was not merely inaccurate but singularly inappropriate from a senator known to have a fondness for drink—and Lincoln jeered that Douglas’s popular-sovereignty doctrine was “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” But on the whole both men behaved with propriety. In the early debates Douglas made a point of complimenting Lincoln’s intelligence and ability, even while strongly disagreeing with his policies. Lincoln professed to be rather taken by the flattery, “especially coming from so great a man as Douglas,” and said he was not used to it. “I was rather like the Hoosier, with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better than any other man, and got less of it.” But he notably did not reciprocate by complimenting Douglas; he found it hard to tell even a white lie.

The informed Illinois voter would note, of course, that there was an enormous amount of repetition from one debate to another. Douglas used the same basic speech, with minor modifications, throughout the campaign; as Lincoln remarked, the senator’s “successive speeches are substantially one and the same.” Though more varied, Lincoln’s speeches frequently included long quoted passages from his previous addresses, and in several of the debates he employed almost identical paragraphs or passages.

There was no evidence that any considerable number of voters were concerned that the Lincoln-Douglas debates concentrated almost exclusively on questions relating to slavery. The speakers could have discussed other serious issues of great importance to a country just emerging from the panic of 1857: regulation of banks, revision of tariffs, control of immigration, provision of homesteads for farmers, improvement of the lot of factory workers, and so on and on. But the debaters focused on none of these because they, and the Illinois voters, felt that the major concern of the country was the present condition and future prospects of the institution of slavery.

By concentrating on slavery, Lincoln and Douglas naturally exaggerated their differences. In a less combative arena they would have found much on which they could agree. For instance, both men disliked slavery; Lincoln openly deplored it and Douglas privately regretted its existence. Both denounced the Lecompton Constitution as a fraud and wanted Kansas to become a free state; indeed, that question had effectively been settled just before the debates began when Kansas voters on August 2 by a vote of 11,300 to 1,788 rejected the Lecompton Constitution, even with the incentives of a large land grant and the promise of early admission offered by the English bill. Neither man favored a slave code to protect slavery in the national territories, and neither would contemplate the extension of slavery into the free states. So numerous were their points of agreement, Lincoln candidly
admitted at Jonesboro, that there was “very much in the principles that Judge Douglas has here enunciated that I most cordially approve, and over which I shall have no controversy with him.”

But, of course, these were debates, not love feasts, and both men felt a need to stress the differences, real and imaginary, that divided them. Many of these were entirely immaterial to the 1858 senate race. For instance, Douglas’s repeated accusation that Lincoln had failed to support his country during the Mexican War had no conceivable bearing on the present contest, nor did his elaborate attempts to show that Trumbull had been guilty of “the most infamous treachery” in helping to defeat Lincoln’s election to the Senate in 1855. It was hard to understand why Lincoln’s tedious account of Trumbull’s charges against Douglas or Douglas’s wearisome report of his differences with Buchanan had any place in this canvass.

Even the larger issues, over which the candidates did profoundly disagree, often had little practical relevance to this election. For example, the controversy over whether the framers of the Declaration of Independence intended to include blacks in announcing that all men are created equal dealt with an interesting, if ultimately unresolvable, historiographical problem, but it was not easy to see just what it had to do with the choice of a senator for Illinois in 1858. And the heated arguments over the capacity and the future of the Negro race, with related controversies over social and political equality of the races, while showing fundamental philosophical differences between the two candidates, did not deal with any issue or legislation that was, or was likely to be, under consideration by the Congress of the United States. Many Illinois voters must have understood Douglas’s exasperated query at the Charleston debate: “What question of public policy, relating to the welfare of this State or the Union, has Mr. Lincoln discussed before you?” But many must also have understood that the same objection could be raised, with equal force, against Douglas himself.

Lincoln’s friends thought he took a clear lead in the final three debates when he stressed the moral issue of slavery, and it was hard to resist the force of his argument. Douglas could only counter by showing that Lincoln’s position was entirely negative: Lincoln was against slavery, but he offered no suggestion as to how it was to be placed “in a course of ultimate extinction.”

For Douglas the fundamental issue in the debates was self-government. In his mind, the right of Americans, whether in the individual states or in the territories, to determine their own form of government and their own social institutions—including slavery, if they so desired—was a moral question, more basic than even the one Lincoln raised. In his final rebuttal in the last debate he once more made his view explicit. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule,” he told listeners at Alton, “than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.”

With the basic differences so formulated, well-informed Illinois voters understood that what was at stake was not just the choice between two
candidates or political parties; it was a choice between two fundamentally opposed views of the meaning of the American experience. One way to formulate that difference was to see Douglas as the advocate of majority rule and Lincoln as the defender of minority rights. In Douglas’s view there were virtually no limits on what the majority of the people of a state or a territory could do—including, if they so chose, holding black-skinned inhabitants in slavery. While Lincoln also valued self-government and would make no attempt to end diversity on, say, cranberry laws in Indiana and Illinois, he felt passionately that no majority should have the power to limit the most fundamental rights of a minority to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.