Lincoln (46 page)

How much the Lincoln-Douglas debates affected the voters remained problematical even after the ballots were tallied. Though November 2 was cold, wet, and raw, voters turned out in large numbers—more than in the 1856 presidential election. The Republican candidate for state treasurer received 125,430 votes, the Douglas Democratic candidate 121,609, and the National Democratic (Danite) candidate 5,071. Ballots for candidates for the state legislature were distributed in about the same proportion. As was expected, the Democrats carried all but three of the counties in southern Illinois and also those along the Illinois River, while Republicans won all of the northern counties, many by heavy majorities. In general, counties that had substantial towns tended to vote Republican, while poorer, slower-growing counties voted Democratic. The forty-nine central counties, where both Lincoln and Douglas had done most of their campaigning, were closely divided.

Since the name of neither Lincoln nor Douglas appeared on any ballot, there was no accurate way of measuring the personal popularity of either man or the impact of their campaigning, and analysts could adduce evidence to support opposite conclusions. On the one hand, it could be noted that in the state as a whole Democratic votes significantly increased in 24 counties where both Douglas and Lincoln spoke, while Republicans gained votes in only five of the counties where both men appeared. On the other, the returns showed that the Republicans fared slightly better in the seven counties where Lincoln and Douglas debated face-to-face than in the state as a whole. These contradictory statistics were less significant than the remarkable pattern of continuity demonstrated in the 1858 voting; the returns were closely similar to those in 1854 and 1856. The most immediate and obvious lesson of the election was that voting patterns in Illinois had become very stable, with the northern counties firmly Republican and the southern half of the state stalwartly Democratic. It was Douglas’s split with the Buchanan administration and Lincoln’s courtship of the Danites that gave Republicans a plurality and kept Douglas and his party from winning a clear majority in the state.

Though Republicans won in the popular vote (and elected their candidates for state treasurer and superintendent of education), they did not gain control of the state legislature, which would choose the next senator. In the state senate, thirteen members were holdovers (the terms of senators were staggered), and eight of these were Democrats. That meant that, in order to have a majority in a joint session of the two houses, the Republicans needed to have more than half the members in the new house of representatives. But seats in the house were apportioned according to the population in the 1850 census. In the years since 1850 the northern section of the state, where the Republicans were strongest, had grown much more rapidly than the southern counties, which the Democrats controlled. Because of the apportionment law, Republicans, who received about 50 percent of the popular vote, won only 47 percent of the seats in the house, while the Democrats with 48 percent of the popular vote gained 53 percent of the seats. That seemed unfair, but even if representation had been apportioned exactly on the basis of population, the Republicans would still have won only 44 seats—not enough, even when their five holdover senators were added, to elect Lincoln. In the balloting on January 5, 1859, Douglas received 54 votes to Lincoln’s 46 and was thus reelected for another six years to the United States Senate.

After their defeat, many Republicans conducted postmortems on the election. The
Rockford Register,
along with many others, blamed “the unjust apportionment of the State, which deprives the people of a representation according to their numbers.” Others pointed to illegal voters allegedly brought in by the Illinois Central Railroad to help the Democrats carry key counties, and Herndon claimed that “thousands of roving—robbing—bloated pock-marked Catholic Irish were imported upon us from Phila[delphia]—St Louis and other cities.” Many condemned Horace Greeley and other Eastern Republicans for their lukewarm support of Lincoln. “D——n Greeley etc,” exclaimed a voter from Paris, Illinois; “they have done Lincoln more harm than all others.” Some thought that Crittenden’s endorsement of Douglas influenced thousands of former Whigs and Americans (Know Nothings), especially in the central part of the state, to go helter-skelter over to the Democrats.

Though Lincoln was not surprised by the outcome of the election, he was bitterly disappointed. Once again, he saw victory escape his grasp. With one more defeat added to his record, he had received yet another lesson in how little his fate was determined by his personal exertions. At times he felt very blue, and on the day the legislature elected Douglas, he was sure that his political career was ended. Confident only of the unquestioning loyalty of his partner, he remarked with some bitterness: “I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.”

But as a leader he recognized his duty to cheer up his associates, who were also suffering from his defeat. “I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his old friend Dr. Henry. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.” “The fight must go on,” he assured another friend. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of
one,
or even, one
hundred
defeats.”

The Taste
Is
in My Mouth

“T
his year I must devote to my private business,” Lincoln vowed in 1859, declining invitations to speak. “I have been on expences so long without earning any thing that I am absolutely without money now for even household purposes,” Lincoln explained to Norman Judd. Accordingly, four days after the 1858 elections, Lincoln & Herndon appeared before the Sangamon County Circuit Court in a case where their client had to pay a judgment of $23 and costs. Other more remunerative cases followed during the next twelve months, but, except for the celebrated Peachy Harrison murder trial, none was of any special importance. As always, Lincoln was careful in his preparation and dependable in his court presentation, but the law had lost some of its excitement for him. At times his letters to clients sounded almost testy. To one, who was dissatisfied with the way Lincoln was handling his suit, he wrote bluntly: “I would now very gladly surrender... the case to anyone you would designate, without charging anything for the much trouble I have already had.”

It was politics that really interested him now. As the leading Republican in Illinois, he felt a great responsibility in planning for his party’s victory in the upcoming presidential election of 1860. To win, it was necessary to keep the fragile Illinois Republican coalition together, to block extreme or diversionary moves by Republicans in other states, and to select a presidential nominee who could combine the votes received by Frémont and Fillmore in 1856.

After the defeat in the senatorial election, the Illinois Republican coalition threatened to disintegrate. The party was in debt. Judd, the chairman of the state central committee, had incurred obligations of about $2,500, in addition to some $1,300 he had paid out of his own pocket. Republicans who had pledged contributions were reluctant to pay up, and Judd unhappily asked Lincoln to help him collect. Protesting that he was “the poorest hand living to get others to pay,” Lincoln promised $250 himself, and then, along with O. M. Hatch and Jesse Dubois, asked Newton Bateman, the state superintendent of education, for assistance. Phrased as a request, their letter was in fact an assessment on the newly elected official who owed his position to the Republican party.

Republicans in central Illinois were slow to contribute because many felt that in the recent campaign the state central committee had slighted their section in favor of the Chicago area. Former Whigs like Judge David Davis resented the prominent role that former Democrats played in the campaign and correctly suspected that Judd was using his position as chairman of the central committee to promote his own gubernatorial prospects. Herndon was so vocal in charging Judd with misapplying party funds that the Chicago attorney had to ask Lincoln to curb his partner. Herndon gave a solemn promise to hold his tongue, but after this outburst Lincoln no longer shared political confidences with his partner.

A disruptive feud that continued to rage in Chicago between Judd and Wentworth was partly a personal vendetta and partly a bitter struggle for supremacy between Wentworth’s
Chicago Democrat
and the
Chicago Press and Tribune,
which consistently supported Judd. In addition to assailing Judd’s financial integrity, Wentworth accused him of conniving against Lincoln: Judd had helped defeat Lincoln’s Senate bid in 1855; his mismanagement had brought about Republican defeat in 1858; and now he was plotting to promote Trumbull, rather than Lincoln, for the presidency. Judd, who desperately wanted to become governor, brought suit for libel, asking $100,000 in damages. Both men appealed to Lincoln for help. Wentworth tried to co-opt him by retaining him as his lawyer in the libel suit, while Judd insisted that he write a public letter vouching for his integrity. Lincoln attempted to remain neutral.

He also tried to keep Republicans in other states from shattering the party harmony. When Republicans in Massachusetts, where nativism was strong, endorsed a constitutional provision requiring naturalized citizens to wait two years before they could vote, Lincoln expressed forthright opposition. “I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro,” he explained; “and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of
white men,
even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.” Similarly, when Ohio Republicans adopted a platform calling for the repeal of
the Fugitive Slave law, he bluntly warned Governor Salmon P. Chase that “the cause of Republicanism is hopeless in Illinois, if it be in any way made responsible for that plank.” “In every locality,” he urged, “we should look beyond our noses; and at least say
nothing
on points where it is probable we shall disagree.”

He continued to worry about the fatal attraction that Stephen A. Douglas had for many Republicans. Though reelected to the Senate, Douglas had lost much Southern support because of his Freeport Doctrine. The almost unprecedented action of the Democratic Senate caucus in removing him from his cherished chairmanship of the Committee on Territories in December 1858 indicated just how few his Southern followers were. Shrewd and realistic, Douglas began making moves to attract backing from Republicans, just as he had done in the Lecompton controversy. He reminded them that he had consistently opposed enacting a slave code that would protect slavery in all the national territories and had fought the reopening of the African slave trade—both measures dear to Southern extremists.

Always suspicious of his great rival, Lincoln thought that Douglas was playing a double game. Douglas was presenting himself as a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860 but at the same time was so positioning himself that if the Democrats rejected him he would “bolt at once, turn upon us, as in the case of Lecompton, and claim that all Northern men shall make common cause in electing him President as the best means of breaking down the Slave power.” Lincoln knew that some Republicans, like Horace Greeley, had never recovered from their earlier infatuation with Douglas, and he was even more troubled when Kansas Republicans, after rejecting the Lecompton Constitution and thus ensuring that their state would be free, began speaking of their victory as a triumph of popular sovereignty. In Lincoln’s first political appearance after the 1858 campaign, he warned Chicago Republicans of the dangers of “Douglasism”: “Let the Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas; let them fall in behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him; he absorbs them.”

Lincoln’s anxiety became greater when he read the long article “The Dividing Line Between Federal and Local Authority: Popular Sovereignty in the Territories,” which Douglas published in the September 1859 issue of
Harper’s Magazine.
Taking as his texts Lincoln’s house-divided speech and Seward’s even more radical “irrepressible conflict” address, Douglas developed at great length his argument that popular sovereignty had consistently been the American policy from the days of the Revolution; that “great principle” meant “that the people of every separate political community (dependent Colonies, Provinces, and Territories as well as sovereign States) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.” By fairly tortuous reasoning he discovered that even the Dred Scott decision had recognized that right. He claimed that popular sovereignty, correctly construed, would block both the Republican efforts to exclude slavery from
the territories by congressional act and Southern attempts to enact a national slave code.