The Fiery Trial (20 page)

While their debates attracted the most attention, Lincoln and Douglas campaigned incessantly throughout the state. Both traveled thousands of miles by rail, but both concentrated their efforts in central Illinois. The northern counties, Lincoln wrote, “we take to ourselves, without question.” As for parts of southern Illinois, “no use trying.” To woo the pivotal Old Line Whigs of central Illinois, Lincoln read “extract after extract” from Henry Clay’s speeches and letters, insisting that he “stood on the very ground occupied by that statesman” while Douglas “was as opposite to it as Beelzebub to an Angel of Light.” For their part, Democrats harped increasingly on the House Divided and Chicago speeches to portray Lincoln as a dangerous radical. Douglas asserted that Republicans planned to repeal Illinois’s Negro exclusion law, opening the door “for all the negro population to flow in and cover our prairies; in mid-day they will look dark and black as night.” “No man of his time,” Frederick Douglass would remark when Douglas died in 1861, “has done more than he to intensify hatred of the negro.”
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Lincoln’s supporters feared Democratic racism was having a political impact. All Republican speakers, David Davis insisted, must “distinctly and emphatically disavow negro suffrage, negro holding office, serving on juries, and the like.” As election day neared, William Brown, a former Whig member of the Illinois legislature now running as the Republican candidate for his old seat, asked Lincoln for material he could use to fend off these charges. Lincoln assembled a scrapbook of passages that, he wrote, “contain the substance of all I have ever said about ‘negro equality,’” beginning with excerpts from his Peoria speech of 1854 and ending with selections from the recent debates.
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In a letter accompanying the book, Lincoln explained his position on racial equality. “I think the negro,” he wrote, “is included in the word ‘men’ used in the Declaration of Independence,” and that slavery was therefore wrong. But natural rights were one thing, political and social rights quite another. As Lincoln explained, “I have expressly disclaimed all intention to bring about social and political equality between the white and black races.” Lincoln added that these views were essentially the same as those of Henry Clay. On the day before the election, the
Illinois State Journal
devoted four columns on its front page to demonstrating that Clay and Lincoln held the same positions on slavery, racial equality, and “the separation of the races.”
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On election day, the Democrats carried seventeen of the formerly Whig legislative districts in central Illinois compared to only eight for Lincoln. “Thus was Lincoln slain in old Kentucky,” wrote the
Chicago Democrat
. William Herndon blamed a letter endorsing Douglas written by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, Clay’s self-styled political heir, for the outcome. “Thousands of Whigs,” he lamented, “dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden.” But there were additional reasons why Republicans failed in 1858 to gain control of the Illinois legislature, ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Many eastern Republicans, including the influential Greeley, gave Lincoln only lukewarm support. Among the party’s national leaders, only Salmon P. Chase, who had been elected governor of Ohio in 1855, came to Illinois to campaign for Lincoln. (Two years later, when Lincoln sought the presidential nomination, he directed an Ohio supporter to “do no ungenerous thing towards Governor Chase, because he gave us his sympathy in 1858, when scarcely any other distinguished man did.”) Douglas’s strong opposition to the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution blunted Lincoln’s efforts to portray him as a supporter of slavery. Even the
Chicago Press and Tribune
, in its election postmortem, admitted that Douglas “stood right on the great vital issue of the day.”
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Nonetheless, had the senator been chosen by popular vote, it seems likely that Lincoln would have emerged victorious. Taken together, the Republican legislative candidates significantly outpolled their opponents. But because the apportionment of seats failed to reflect the rapid increase in population in the northern counties since 1850, Democrats retained control of both houses. The Republican candidates for treasurer and superintendent of public instruction, the only statewide offices contested in 1858, defeated their Democratic rivals by around 125,000 votes to 121,000. Because of the state’s “antique apportionment law,” wrote the
Press and Tribune
, Douglas was reelected, but “Illinois is a Republican state.”
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Outside Illinois, 1858 ushered in a historic electoral realignment. Republicans swept to power not only in their strongholds in the Upper North, but in the key swing states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. With the Lecompton battle having discredited the Buchanan administration in the North and Douglas in the South, prospects for a Republican victory in 1860 seemed bright. As for Lincoln, 1858 made him a national figure for the first time. “Your speeches are read with great avidity by all political men,” the Chicago editor Charles H. Ray reported from upstate New York in the midst of the campaign. Despite his refusal to embrace equal rights for blacks, many Radicals and abolitionists praised Lincoln for the forthrightness of his moral critique of slavery, his refusal to compromise the party’s principles by withdrawing in favor of Douglas, and his insistence that the institution must eventually come to an end. Even though Lincoln twice stated during the debates that abolition might not occur “in less than a hundred years,” the juxtaposition of the phrases “house divided” and “ultimate extinction” gave his speeches a radical edge he may not have entirely intended. The House Divided speech, Frederick Douglass proclaimed in August—his first known direct mention of Lincoln—was “well and wisely said…. Liberty or slavery must become the law of the land.”

Lincoln seems to have assumed that the defeat marked the end of his aspiration for higher office. The battle “must go on,” he wrote, but he expected to “fight in the ranks.” But other Republicans already had a different idea. Three days after the election, George W. Rives, a party activist in Paris, Illinois, wrote, “My God, it is too bad. Now I am for Lincoln for the nomination for president in 1860.”
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III

B
Y
1859, Lincoln had a five-year record of public opposition to the expansion of slavery. That summer and fall, when he resumed public speaking, most of what he said was familiar. But in these speeches Lincoln placed new emphasis on what had previously been a subordinate theme in his political arsenal—the rights of northern “free labor.” He found that this resonated powerfully with his audiences.

Ever since the party’s creation, Republicans had contrasted the economic growth of the North with what they saw as the South’s stagnation, and explained the difference by the superiority of free to slave labor. “It is the energizing power of free labor,” Lincoln’s friend Richard Yates told Congress in 1854, “which has built our railroads, set the wheels of machinery in motion, added new wings to commerce, and laid the solid foundation for our permanent prosperity and renown.”
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As the decade progressed, discussions of free labor and the differences between free and slave society became more and more frequent. A key reason was the increasing stridency of southern defenders of slavery, who insisted that the freedom of the northern wage-earner amounted to little more than the opportunity either to be exploited or to starve.

Proslavery ideologues like George Fitzhugh insisted that the northern laborer was in fact “the slave of the
community
,” a situation far more oppressive than to be owned by a single paternalistic master who shielded his workers from the exploitation of the competitive marketplace. The very titles of Fitzhugh’s books constituted an assault on northern market capitalism:
Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society
(1854) and
Cannibals All!, or, Slaves Without Masters
(1857). By the late 1850s, the critique of free labor as inherently exploitative had become increasingly common among the defenders of slavery. In one widely quoted speech before the Senate in March 1858, James Hammond of South Carolina accused the antislavery movement of hypocrisy for ignoring the plight of workers at home. He hurled an explosive accusation: “Your whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves.”
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In the 1830s, the description of northern workers as victims of “wage slavery” had been employed by the northern labor movement, Democratic politicians, and others uneasy with the consequences of the market revolution. Their critique had inspired defenders of market society to celebrate the harmony of interests that allegedly united all classes in the North. The free-labor ideology that emerged as a central tenet of the Republican party in the 1850s drew on this tradition. But unlike in the 1830s, the glorification of free labor and its opportunities for advancement in a free society was directed not against critics in the North, but the slave South. Republican newspapers and political leaders tried to refute southern charges by insisting that northern workers enjoyed an opportunity for social mobility unknown to slaves. “Our paupers of today, thanks to free labor, are our yeomen and merchants of tomorrow,” declared the
New York Times
in November 1857. Invoking an economic argument that harkened back to the writings of Adam Smith, Republicans insisted that the opportunity to rise in the social scale provided a more effective incentive to work than the lash; hence free labor was inherently more productive than slave. Few Republicans associated freedom with social opportunity or developed the glorification of free labor into a critique of southern slave society more effectively than Lincoln.
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As early as the mid-1840s, Lincoln had invoked God’s words to Adam—” in the sweat of thy face thy shall earn bread”—to vindicate the right of the worker to “the whole product of his labor.” Then, however, he was discussing the tariff; free trade, he claimed, allowed those who lived “without labor” (merchants, bankers, etc.) to siphon off “a large proportion of the fruits.”
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In the 1850s, Lincoln returned to this theme, but as a powerful argument against slavery. He now described the slave as a worker illegitimately denied the fruits of his or her labor. Slavery, in other words, was a form of theft. Adding the contrast between free and slave labor to his preexisting critique of the moral and political foundations of slavery enabled Lincoln to crystallize his particular version of northern nationalism. The protection of the rights of free labor emerged as a fundamental reason why slavery must be confined to its existing locale and placed on the road to ultimate extinction.

Lincoln was fascinated and disturbed by the works of proslavery ideologues. In a speech in Michigan during the 1856 presidential campaign, Lincoln cited the
Richmond Enquirer
to argue that southerners erroneously believed that “their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen.”
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He expanded greatly on this theme in 1859.

When Lincoln accepted an invitation to travel to Ohio to aid Republicans there in the fall 1859 campaign, one motivation, as so often seemed to be the case, was to counter Stephen A. Douglas. In September, Douglas contributed a long article to
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
. The choice of venue, an important literary periodical published in New York City rather than a political journal, suggested the significance Douglas attached to the piece. Douglas insisted that the doctrine of popular sovereignty arose directly from the policies of the founders and their commitment to “local self-government.” In his speeches in Ohio and elsewhere in the Northwest, Lincoln took issue with the argument of what he sarcastically called Douglas’s “copy-right essay.” He hammered away at arguments by now familiar in his speeches: slavery was a wrong “to the nation,” requiring a national policy “that deals with the institution as being wrong.” He challenged Douglas’s account of the founders’ intentions. “Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas,” he implored his audience at Columbus.
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In 1858, Charles H. Ray had urged Lincoln to refer to his humble origins to enhance his reputation: “If you have been the architect of your own fortunes, you may claim the most merit.” Now, in repudiating the southern critique of free labor, Lincoln invoked his own rise from hired laborer to economic independence to offer a portrait of a society of unbounded opportunity:

Slaveowners, Lincoln continued, had taken labor, “the common
burthen
of our race,” and placed it on “the shoulders of others.” In so doing they had degraded their own society, for “
hope
” was a far more powerful incentive to “human exertion” than “the rod.”
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