The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (13 page)

He was careless of his dress, and his clothes, instead of fitting neatly as did the garments of Douglas on the latter’s well-rounded form, hung loosely on his giant frame. As he moved along in his speech he became freer and less uneasy in his movements; to that extent he was graceful. He had a perfect naturalness, a strong individuality; and to that extent he was dignified. He despised glitter, show, set forms, and shams. He spoke with effectiveness and to move the judgment as well as the emotions of men. There was a world of meaning and emphasis in the long, bony finger of his right hand as he dotted the ideas on the minds of his hearers. Sometimes, to express joy or pleasure, he would raise both hands at an angle of about fifty degrees, the palms upward, as if desirous of embracing the spirit of that which he loved. If the sentiment was one of detestation—denunciation of slavery, for example—both arms, thrown upward and fists clenched, swept through the air, and he expressed an execration that was truly sublime. This was one of his most effective gestures, and signified most vividly a fixed determination to drag down the object of his hatred and trample it in the dust.

He always stood squarely on his feet, toe even with toe; that is, he never put one foot before the other. He neither touched nor leaned on anything for support. He made but few changes in his positions and attitudes. He never walked backward and forward on the platform. To ease his arms he frequently caught hold,
with his left hand, of the lapel of his coat, keeping his thumb upright and leaving his right hand free to gesticulate.…

As he proceeded with his speech the exercise of his vocal organs altered somewhat the tone of his voice. It lost in a measure its former acute and shrilling pitch, and mellowed into a more harmonious and pleasant sound. His form expanded, and, notwithstanding the sunken breast, he rose up a splendid and imposing figure.… His little gray eyes flashed in a face aglow with the fire of his profound thoughts; and his uneasy movements and diffident manner sunk themselves beneath the wave of righteous indignation that came sweeping over him. Such was Lincoln the orator.

The first debate took place at Ottawa on August 21; the other six followed at intervals until mid-October. Summer slowly turned into autumn; leaves drifted down from the oaks and walnuts of the prairie groves; crowds that had come in shirt-sleeves came in coats and shawls. History was being made in Illinois and the crowds sensed dimly what was happening. They saw Abraham Lincoln and they saw Stephen A. Douglas. Then they went home convinced that they had seen at least one great man.

The actual content of the debates is disappointing when first read in the full stenographic reports that were taken of every word spoken. There are many arid passages, and worst of all, both speakers repeat themselves again and again. It may almost be said that each speaker had one standard argument for which the other had one standard reply.
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The high point in strategy was achieved by Lincoln during the second debate at Freeport. Douglas had presented a set of questions for Lincoln to answer; Lincoln prepared a set for Douglas, the second one of which was:

Can the people of a United States territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state constitution?

This was, of course, a very ticklish question for Douglas. If he answered in one way, he would lose the support of his own Illinois constituents and the race for the Senatorship; if he answered in another way he was sure to lose the support of the South.

Lincoln had already correctly forecast what Douglas’s answer would be. In a letter to a friend, Henry Asbury, dated July 31, he had said:

The points you propose to press upon Douglas he will be very hard to get up to, but I think you labor under a mistake when you say no one cares how he answers. This implies that it is equal with him whether he is injured here or at the South. That is a mistake. He cares nothing for the South; he knows he is already dead there. He only leans Southward more to keep the Buchanan party from growing in Illinois. You shall have hard work to get him directly to the point whether a territorial legislature has or has not the power to exclude slavery. But if you succeed in bringing him to it—though he will be compelled to say it possesses no such power—he will instantly take ground that slavery cannot actually exist in the territories unless the people desire it, and so give it protection by territorial legislation. If this offends the South, he will let it offend them, as at all events he means to hold on to his chances in Illinois.

Douglas made the inevitable answer; his split with the Buchanan administration was widened still farther; he won the Illinois election and lost the Presidency in 1860, when Southerners flocked to his rival Breckinridge.

On October 15, the great debates came to a close at Alton, where the two candidates spoke in the public square overlooking the Mississippi River. Douglas had the final word, speaking in rejoinder to Lincoln, and when he had finished making an appeal to the voters to stand by old traditions, to
avoid agitators and to let everything remain as it had always been, the campaign was over. Lincoln returned to Springfield, poor in pocket, and forced to concentrate his energy on his law practice which he had neglected for nearly six months. Everybody waited for the election that was to be held on November 2.

Election day was cold and rainy; Lincoln’s heart sank as the returns came in. The Republicans gained in power and prestige, but the Democrats still held control in both Houses of the State Legislature, making Douglas’s election practically certain.

Lincoln was disappointed. He had been willing to jeopardize his chance of winning when he had made Douglas commit himself at Freeport, but he still hoped that he might somehow win the Senatorship. Had he obtained it, it would have advanced his strategic position; it was an important post—one in which he might have made a name for himself during the two years before the 1860 Presidential election would be held. He was disappointed but determined not to give up the struggle. Two weeks later he wrote a revealing letter to his friend, Henry Asbury:

The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats, Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come.

The explosion predicted by Lincoln was purely a political one. A more important and devastating one had been forecast by another great political leader, William H. Seward. Speaking at Rochester, New York, on October 25, ten days after the end of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Seward gave the coming struggle for power a name that was to stick to it. After drawing a comparison between the systems of free labor
and slave labor, he said that their mutual antagonism was not “accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators and therefore ephemeral.…
It is an irrepressible conflict
between opposing and enduring forces.…”

The man who was to be the Northern President during this irrepressible conflict again had to return to his old life, riding the circuit, pleading law cases in country courts and staying at nights in small-town inns and taverns where he was still one of the boys. The next year—1859—was not one of outstanding achievement for him although he was called upon to speak several times at places outside the state.
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He also made several unsuccessful attempts at non-political lecturing, but mostly he just waited with that vast patience that was his. He studied the situation as it developed, and he studied it until he was able to analyze its hidden meanings and so deduce its probable tendency and drift.

The year 1859 was a year of desperate measures on the part of individuals North and South. These individuals did not have the official approval of the communities they represented, but they expressed in action the most advanced ideas that were taking form in the two opposing camps. A few bold men in the South attempted to revive the slave trade from Africa, bringing back upon the high seas the horrors of the Middle Passage that had been outlawed for fifty years. One bold man in the North declared a private war on the slaveholders and took up arms against them in an insurrectionary attempt to seize the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in order to arm the slaves.

Sporadic attempts to run slaves from Africa to the United States had been made for years, but the severity of the law and the vigilance of the navy had discouraged the trade from becoming general. Slave prices were on the rise in the South during the fifties; prime field hands had risen to the all-time
high of $1500 to $2000 a head. Slaves were scarce and more slaves were needed. The very system was one that rapidly exhausted the soil and the men who worked it, consequently a fresh supply of both was continually needed. The demand for new soil gave rise to the territorial expansion program of the South; the demand for slaves gave rise to attempts to smuggle them into the country and to a movement to make the trade legitimate by repealing slave trade laws. At the Southern Convention held at Vicksburg in May 1859, a vote of 40 to 19 was cast in favor of a resolution recommending the repeal of all laws restricting the African slave trade. Slave ships were actually fitted out and put into service. The profits in the forbidden trade were enormous, since Negroes could be purchased on the African coast for $50 a head and sold in America for $500, even under the surreptitious conditions of sale made necessary by their illegal entry. Unscrupulous promoters—Northern as well as Southern—were willing to risk their capital for such tremendous possibilities of increase; ship’s officers and sailors were ready to make a voyage that paid them many times more than any regular trading venture could. Death was the penalty for engaging in the slave trade
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—the old piracy laws had been extended to cover it—but ships were bought, and men willing to sail them could be hired.

Douglas, who was emphatically opposed to reviving the odious trade and who was in a position to be kept informed of its progress, once said that 15,000 Negroes had been brought into the country in 1859—a figure greater than that of any year during the period when the traffic had still been legal. Douglas also said that if the Democrats made the
re-opening of the slave trade a principle in their party platform he would decline their nomination for the Presidency in the 1860 campaign.

The revival of the African slave trade was kept relatively quiet—so quiet in fact that its importance is sometimes overlooked in historical discussions of the events leading to the Civil War. Nevertheless, it was a move on the part of the South almost as desperate as the single-handed gesture made by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.

John Brown’s attempt was not so foolhardly as many have liked to believe. Fugitive slaves from the South had for years been taking refuge in Canada; they were a picked lot of men who had had the courage to break away from their masters and make the long difficult journey north. Brown was in touch with some of them and he had planned for them to come to Virginia to assist him as soon as he had captured the arsenal. He expected, too, that the slaves in the South would rise in one great insurrectionary movement to overthrow their masters. Slave revolts had been numerous in the South—more numerous than written history records, for they were put down with an iron hand and all news of them was suppressed whenever possible in order to prevent a local insurrection from spreading by example. The South was in deadly fear of an uprising of the slaves. It was something that haunted the mind of every slaveholder, and every plantation possessed its own private arsenal to be used in case the long-dreaded revolt ever broke out.

John Brown entered Harper’s Ferry during the night of October 16, 1859. With a band of only eighteen men he seized the town and stopped the trains and telegraphs. He succeeded in holding the place for one day; then a force of United States marines under command of Colonel Robert E.
Lee put down the miniature rebellion, killing ten of Brown’s followers and capturing the fierce old leader.

News of the insurrection brought terror to Northern and Southern people alike. The long breeding conflict had broken out into open warfare, and the spot picked for the initial battle was near enough to both Northern and Southern centers of population to make them feel that the battle had begun on their own doorsteps. This was no distant rumbling of the drum in far-off Kansas. It was a thunderbolt let loose in the heart of the East. Harper’s Ferry was only fifty-three miles from Washington and only one hundred and sixty miles from Richmond. It was a small place, but it was a railroad junction with which thousands of people were familiar, for they had seen its wild gorges as their trains had passed through, bound for the South, the North or the West.

The interrogation of Brown and the testimony brought out during his trial caused a tremendous sensation. Although John Brown resolutely refused to reveal anything that might implicate the abolitionists who had backed him, some of these men took fright and revealed their own identity by fleeing to Canada and Europe in order to get beyond reach of the American law.

Brown himself was brought to trial immediately, being taken into the courtroom while he was still on a cot recovering from his wounds. His bearing during the trial was so fearless, so completely that of a man who felt that what he had done was right and who was perfectly willing to stand the consequences, that he won admiration even from those who were bent on sending him to his death. On December 2, 1859, he was led to the gallows, and there, surrounded by troops of soldiers, he was hanged. Among the uniformed men in a volunteer regiment from Richmond was a man who was to take an active part in another historic death. He was a young actor, intensely pro-Southern in his sympathies. His name was John Wilkes Booth.