The Fiery Trial (19 page)

Douglas’s repudiation of the Declaration’s universality, Lincoln continued, threatened the foundations of democratic government:

These words, with which Lincoln ended his speech, constituted the most forthright affirmation of equality of Lincoln’s entire career.

Lincoln’s practice of following Douglas around Illinois to respond to his speeches struck Republicans as demeaning. Soon after the Chicago speech and a similar encounter in Springfield, Lincoln challenged Douglas to meet him in a series of debates. They quickly agreed on a series of seven encounters to take place between late August and mid-October in towns scattered across Illinois. The Great Debates attracted immense national attention as they were taking place and became part of the lore of American politics. Newspapers from throughout the country sent reporters to cover them, and transcripts quickly appeared in the press. Thousands of listeners attended each debate.

The two candidates could not have cut more different figures. The short, stocky Douglas dressed in elegantly tailored suits, spoke with great force, tried to be constantly on the attack, and appealed unabashedly to the racial prejudices of his listeners. Accompanied by his fashionable second wife, Adele, a grand-niece of first lady Dolley Madison and at twenty-two less than half his age, Douglas arrived at each debate in a private railcar and was greeted by the firing of cannons by his supporters. Lincoln, tall and angular, and often dressed in rumpled clothing, traveled alone, seated with the regular passengers. Having long perfected ways of establishing rapport with his audience, Lincoln self-consciously adopted the persona of the judicious and rational underdog. His “appearance is not comely,” one newspaper commented, but “he has no superior as a stump speaker.”
²¹

Unlike modern presidential debates where the candidates offer brief, pre-programmed answers to questions posed by a moderator or members of the audience, the Lincoln-Douglas debates consisted of a series of set speeches. One candidate opened with an hour-long address. The other responded for an hour and a half. The first then had thirty minutes to reply. The speeches were repetitious and sometimes tedious. Each candidate made unsubstantiated charges against the other. Douglas, according to Lincoln, had joined in a plan to nationalize slavery (although somewhat incongruously, Lincoln also condemned him for indifference as to whether slavery did or did not spread into the territories). Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, Douglas declared, had conspired to destroy the Whig and Democratic parties in order to “abolitionize” Illinois and satisfy their hunger for political office. Each presented himself as a moderate while accusing the other of being too radical for their state. Lincoln, Douglas asserted, advocated “monstrous” doctrines that threatened to bring on “warfare between the North and the South.” Lincoln accused Douglas of diverting the nation from the course regarding slavery on which the founding fathers had embarked. With former Whig voters in central Illinois holding the balance of power, each claimed the political mantle of Henry Clay (oddly in the case of Douglas, who had opposed most of what Clay stood for during his long political career).

Yet despite their imperfections, there was something remarkable about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Carl Schurz, who had emigrated from Germany after the failed revolution of 1848 and emerged in the 1850s as a prominent western Republican, recorded in his memoirs having been “deeply impressed by the democratic character of the spectacle…. Here were two men, neither of whom had enjoyed any of the advantages of superior breeding or education…[who] contended for…mastery by appealing to the intelligence and patriotism of the people.” The debates, as Republican political leader James G. Blaine later noted, exemplified how American politics had been transformed in the preceding two years. Despite the onset in 1857 of an economic downturn whose effects still lingered in Illinois, the candidates completely ignored economic matters. As Blaine recounted, they did not mention “protection, free trade, internal improvements, the subtreasury, all the issues, in short, which had divided parties for a long series of years.” The debates focused on “one issue” and one alone, Blaine continued, thus reflecting “the public mind” of the late 1850s. Indeed, in Lincoln’s correspondence with constituents and party leaders in 1858, slavery and the rights of blacks were virtually the only matters to receive attention. Overall, the debates offered a serious public discussion of the most fundamental problem dividing the nation and the first real gauge of the impact of the
Dred Scott
decision on American politics. As a Washington newspaper observed, thanks to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Illinois “becomes, as it were, the Union.”
²²

The first debate took place on August 21 at Ottawa, a town in northern Illinois whose population of around 9,000 more than doubled on the day of the encounter. A few days earlier, an old friend had advised Lincoln that thus far in the campaign he had “acted too much on the defensive.” He urged him to “assail” Douglas “at every vulnerable point.” But as the opening speaker, Douglas immediately seized the initiative with a scattershot series of charges: Lincoln had sided with the country’s enemies during the Mexican War; was responsible for radical resolutions adopted by a local Republican convention in 1854 that included calls for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and abolition in the District of Columbia; and intended to “make all the institutions uniform, and set the niggers and white people to marrying.” Thrown on the defensive, Lincoln seemed to have difficulty responding.
²³

The night before the second debate, scheduled for August 27 in the small town of Freeport (population around 5,000) located in northern Illinois, a group of Republican leaders met to plot strategy. They urged Lincoln to counterattack vigorously. He should repudiate the more radical planks of the 1854 platform, ask Douglas “a few ugly questions,” and portray him “as a traitor & conspirator, a proslavery, bamboozelling demagogue.” So, after beginning by stating that he favored modification but not repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act and in other ways staking out his position as a moderate, Lincoln posed a series of questions to Douglas. In view of the
Dred Scott
decision, which Douglas had endorsed, could the people of a territory legally prohibit slavery? If not, what became of Douglas’s vaunted principle of popular sovereignty? This was the famous “Freeport question,” intended to drive a further wedge between Douglas and the Buchanan administration and to force Douglas to alienate either the South, by repudiating Taney’s ruling, or northern supporters, by abandoning popular sovereignty.
²⁴

Lincoln surely anticipated Douglas’s response since, as his rival remarked, he had already given his answer “a hundred times from every stump in Illinois.” The people of a territory, Douglas declared, could lawfully prohibit slavery by refusing to enact the “local police regulations” without which owners would not risk bringing slaves into an area, or by enacting “unfriendly legislation.” A few weeks earlier, Jefferson Davis had said much the same thing in a speech in Maine. Douglas was so pleased with his formula, which enabled him to claim fealty to both
Dred Scott
and popular sovereignty, that he repeated it in subsequent debates. On one occasion he directly quoted Davis’s Maine speech to demonstrate the national appeal of his “Freeport doctrine.”
²⁵

In a letter on the eve of the Freeport debate conveying the recommendations of Republican strategists, the Chicago editor Joseph Medill urged Lincoln to “make short work of…nigger equality charges by telling him…that it is humbug, slang and trash.” But Lincoln was already receiving letters from supporters in central and southern Illinois about the political impact of these charges, and urging him to make clear in no uncertain terms that “the Republicans are not in favor of making the blacks socially and politically equal with the whites.” As the debates proceeded, Douglas relied more and more on race baiting. He claimed, for example, that Frederick Douglass had been seen in Illinois campaigning for Lincoln, “reclin[ing]” in a carriage next to the white driver’s wife.
²⁶

At the fourth debate in Charleston, a town of 14,000 in the heart of Old Whig territory in central Illinois, Lincoln tried to neutralize Douglas’s assaults with an explicit statement on the question of racial equality:

Later in the debate, Lincoln stated that while he believed states had the constitutional right to make blacks citizens, he was “opposed to [its] exercise” in Illinois.
²⁷

Several times during the debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of altering his positions according to the political geography of Illinois. Certainly, a marked difference existed between the principled affirmation of equality in his Chicago speech early in the campaign and Lincoln’s remarks at Charleston, where he even omitted his usual statement that blacks were entitled to the kind of equality outlined in the Declaration. At the next debate, at Galesburg in north-central Illinois, Lincoln did return to this theme, insisting that no one until the past few years had denied that the language of the Declaration about natural rights was meant to apply to blacks. But for the rest of the campaign he continued to deny that he favored black citizenship. Abolitionists found Lincoln’s comments appalling. “He forsook principle and planted himself on low prejudice,” lamented the
Congregational Herald
, published in Chicago. On the other hand, conservative Republicans were delighted. David Davis wrote Lincoln that he found the way he handled the issue “admirable.”
²⁸

Seeking to fight on the most favorable political terrain, Douglas persistently maintained that the question of “what shall be done with the free negro” far exceeded the slavery controversy in importance. For his part, having answered to his own satisfaction the charge of “Negro equality,” Lincoln in the last three debates pushed to the forefront the subject he felt most fully exemplified his differences with Douglas—the morality of slavery. At Galesburg he declared that the “real difference” between himself and Douglas was that “every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is anything wrong in slavery.” He said much the same thing six days later at the Quincy debate.
²⁹
The seventh and final encounter took place at Alton, where Elijah P. Lovejoy had met his death two decades earlier. Neither man mentioned the martyred editor, although Douglas referred in passing to his brother Owen Lovejoy. Lincoln tried to appeal to the broadest spectrum of the antislavery electorate. To adopt Douglas’s policies, he said, would make it impossible for “free white people,” including immigrants—“Hans and Baptiste and Patrick”—to find new homes and “better their conditions in life” by moving to the West. Here was a racialized antislavery that seemed to view the peculiar institution primarily as a threat to the future prospects of white Americans. But at the same time, Lincoln repeated that the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks. He accused Democrats of attempting to “dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man…to make property, and nothing but property of the Negro
in all the states of this Union
.” In the rhetorical high point of the seven debates, he identified the long crusade against slavery with the global progress of democratic egalitarianism: