The new decade found Abraham Lincoln back home again in Springfield, while Stephen Douglas reclaimed his place in the United States Senate. His own lamentable term in Congress now behind him, Lincoln entered a period of self-imposed political exile, one that would last for the next four years. For both men, the years ahead would bring great and often painful changes in their lives and would be attended, as such transformations often are, by a series of deaths and aftershocks.
The winter of 1849–50 was particularly hard on Mary Lincoln. In the space of a few months, she lost both her father and her grandmother; then her younger son Eddie fell gravely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis. For fifty-two days, Mary nursed Eddie through a series of fitful rallies and heartbreaking declines before the boy died on February 1, 1850, not yet four years of age. The grieving parents dealt with their loss in characteristic ways: Mary took to her bed, weeping inconsolably and refusing to eat, only rousing herself periodically to berate the servants, her husband, and their surviving son. Lincoln internalized his grief, saying only, “We miss [Eddie] very much.” He lost himself in his work, returning to the paper-strewn law offices of Lincoln & Herndon. “From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, he practiced law more assiduously than ever before,” Lincoln wrote of himself in the third person a few years later. With Eddie’s death clearly on his mind, he turned down a lucrative offer to join a Chicago law firm on the grounds that “he tended to consumption” and the lakefront weather “would kill him.” There is no evidence that Lincoln ever suffered from consumption—the nineteenth-century word for tuberculosis—and the arduous hours he habitually kept belied any trace of physical illness, but his highly susceptible imagination may have transferred Eddie’s symptoms to himself. While Lincoln worked hard at rebuilding his legal practice, Mary became pregnant again almost immediately and bore their third son, William, inevitably nicknamed “Willie,” on December 21, 1850.1
As they had done previously, Lincoln and Herndon divided their duties. Herndon researched cases at the state supreme court library, while Lincoln interviewed prospective clients, drafted briefs and declarations, and argued cases in the various courts. While always imminently logical and clear-eyed in the courtroom, Lincoln nevertheless nursed some peculiar preconceptions with regard to juries. Fat men, he believed, made the best jurors, since they were naturally jolly and easily swayed. Men with high foreheads had already made up their minds and could not be “argufied” into agreement. Blue-eyed blonds were inherently nervous and tended to side with prosecutors. Whatever the makeup of the jury, once he accepted a case, Lincoln pursued it with bulldog determination, whether it was a $2.50 lawsuit over a herd of cattle trampling someone’s cornfield or a capital murder trial involving the wastrel son of his old New Salem friends, Jack and Hannah Armstrong, which he would take up in 1857. The young man, called Duff, was charged with killing an acquaintance in a drunken brawl. He was acquitted after an emotional closing argument by Lincoln, who cited the couple’s many kindnesses to him and accepted no fee for his services.2
Lincoln continued to ride the circuit in the Eighth Judicial District, this time with a new presiding judge. Samuel Treat had moved up to the state supreme court while Lincoln was in Washington, and his replacement, Bloomington lawyer David Davis, quickly became one of Lincoln’s closest acquaintances. The rotund Davis easily topped 300 pounds—it was said that he had to be surveyed for a new pair of trousers. Too heavy for any one horse to bear, he rode to court in a specially designed two-horse carriage. A graduate of Yale Law School, Davis had made a fortune in real estate while serving in the Illinois legislature. A Whig like Lincoln, he, too, favored a moderate stance toward slavery, an outgrowth perhaps of his boyhood in Maryland. Davis came to value Lincoln’s levelheaded approach to the law, often appointing him a substitute judge in his absence. The two traced the roughly rectangular circuit from Springfield to Metamora to Danville to Shelbyville, some 12,000 square miles that, as the weary Davis was always pointing out, was equal in size to the state of Connecticut. In the course of their travels, they shared hotel rooms, meals, stories, and jokes (but not beds; Davis was so large that he required his own). At no time, however, did Davis consider himself Lincoln’s intimate. “Lincoln never confided to me anything,” he observed, adding that his friend “was not a sociable man by any means,” and that he had “no strong emotional feelings for any person—mankind or thing.” Still, Davis thought, Lincoln was happy riding the Eighth District, or at least “as happy as he could be.”3
Although he later claimed that “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind,” Lincoln did not entirely forgo politics—he was too much of a party man for that. Stretched out on the sofa in his office, Lincoln pored over the current issues of the Congressional Globe and the Illinois State Journal (formerly the Sangamo Journal), following the ongoing debate over the Wilmot Proviso, California statehood, and the ever-vexing problem of slavery. In July 1850, he was stunned along with the rest of the nation by the sudden death of President Zachary Taylor, who had sickened and died after eating a bowl of cherries and chugging down a pitcher of ice-cold milk—a double mistake in a city whose poor sanitation made it perilous to consume raw fruit or dairy products during the sweltering summer months. The president died of cholera morbus, the same illness that had carried off Mary Lincoln’s father at a still-vigorous fifty-nine a few months earlier. (Long-held rumors of assassination by arsenic poisoning were not put entirely to rest until Taylor’s body was exhumed in 1991 and found to be poison-free.)4
Putting aside his lingering resentment at being passed over for Land Office commissioner, Lincoln agreed to deliver a public eulogy for the second straight Whig president to die soon after taking office. The invitation came from the Common Council of Chicago while Lincoln was presenting a case to the U.S. district court, and he accepted with the reservation that “the want of time for preparation will make the task, for me, a very difficult one to perform.” He was right. The eulogy he gave was an oddly—or perhaps, given their recent history, not so oddly—impersonal address. “The death of the late president may not be without its use,” Lincoln said, “in reminding us that we, too, must die. Death, abstractly considered, is the same with the high as with the low.” Even given the traditions of the moment, Lincoln stepped a little over the line when he fulsomely praised the leading general of a war he had lost his congressional seat denouncing. Seeking to impart a sense of patriotic drama to the rather lifeless speech, Lincoln apostrophized Taylor’s victory at Palo Alto: “And now the din of battle nears the fort and sweeps obliquely by; a gleam of hope flies through the half imprisoned few; they fly to the wall; every eye is strained—it is—it is—the stars and stripes are still aloft!…. [T]he heavens are rent with a loud, long, glorious, gushing cry of victory! victory!! victory!!!”5
There was no eulogy—grandiloquent or not—for Lincoln’s father, Thomas, when he died in January 1851. Lincoln, in fact, did not attend the funeral, and declined to visit the dying man beforehand. When his stepbrother John Johnston wondered why Lincoln would not even write to their father, Lincoln responded tersely that “it appeared to me I could write nothing which could do any good.” Citing the pressure of work and the recent birth of his new son, Lincoln stayed home in Springfield while his father worsened. In response to another plea from Johnston, he piously advised the dying man “to remember to call upon, and confide in, our great, and good, and merciful Maker; who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man, who puts his trust in Him.” Coming from someone who rarely if ever darkened the doors of a church, it was less-than-persuasive advice. The heart of the matter came later, when Lincoln admitted that “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” The memories of his straitened childhood, which sometimes overtook him during his notorious bouts of melancholy, were best kept at a distance along with the rest of his hardscrabble past. In his own mind, at least, he had buried his father several years before he died.6
Taylor’s death presented a much-needed political opening to Stephen Douglas and other leaders in Congress who were wrestling with the issue of slavery. Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, evoking the Bible, spoke for many when he compared the current political situation in the United States to the plague of frogs that had infested Egypt during the days of Moses. “We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us,” Benton complained. “Here it is, this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!” Reflecting the heightened sense of urgency, all three of the so-called Great Triumvirate in the Senate—Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster—gave major speeches in the winter of 1850 on the crisis facing the nation in the toxic wake of the Mexican War. Clay, who spoke first, typically sought to conciliate pro-and antislavery factions by introducing a group of resolutions dealing with the disposition of territory acquired in the Mexican Cession. Under Clay’s plan, California would be admitted to the Union as a free state, while the rest of the new lands would be organized without reference to slavery. Describing himself as depressed, appalled, and anxious, Clay warned that the nation stood “at the edge of the precipice, before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable destruction.”7
Clay was followed, in turn, by Calhoun and Webster. Calhoun, suffering from a soon-to-be-fatal case of tuberculosis, was carried into the chamber swathed in flannel blankets from his feet to his shoulders. His face, gaunt and fever-ridden, stared out at his colleagues like a wraithlike apparition—what his fellow southerners called a “ha’nt.” Unable to speak above a whisper, Calhoun had Virginia senator James Mason read his speech for him. In it he placed the lion’s share of blame for sectional tensions on the federal government, which he said had consistently favored the North at the expense of the South. His own region, he cautioned, could no longer remain in the Union “as things now are, consistently with honor and safety.” Calhoun wanted a constitutional amendment enacted immediately to allow the South “to protect herself.”8
Webster, in his address, presented himself “not as a Massachusetts man, not as a northern man, but as an American.” He renounced his earlier support for the Wilmot Proviso, which he now saw as a gratuitous measure designed to “taunt or reproach” the South, one rendered unnecessary by the natural habitat of the desert Southwest and “the law of nature” that made slavery unfeasible there. Instead, he urged northerners to support the Clay proposals, including a provision strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law. At the same time, Webster chastised southern hotheads who were threatening secession. “I would rather hear of natural blasts and mildews, war, pestilence, and famine, than to hear gentlemen talk of secession,” he sighed.9
Having made their curtain calls, so to speak, on the congressional stage, the members of the Great Triumvirate withdrew for good from the national spotlight. Calhoun died on cue four weeks later, supposedly breathing out a last theatrical lament for “my poor South.” Clay, suffering from steadily worsening tuberculosis, returned to his summer home at Newport, Rhode Island, in a vain attempt to recuperate. Webster, although in better physical health than his two wasted colleagues, found his political career fatally injured by his speech. Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier dashed off a poem suggesting that Webster had become a foil of the great “Tempter,” and his co-transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson fumed that Webster had permanently removed his name “from all the files of honor.” The strongest denunciation came a few days later, when New York senator William Seward unleashed an incendiary address defying the Fugitive Slave Law and calling for the Wilmot Proviso to be extended to the new western territories. “There is a higher law than the Constitution,” Seward declared. Putting the abolitionist movement on the side of the angels, Seward anointed himself and his followers as stewards of the Lord, entrusted with safeguarding “the common heritage of mankind.” The unreligious Clay fired back: “Who are they who venture to tell us what is divine and what is natural law? Where are their credentials of prophecy?”10
With the departure of Clay and his cohorts, it remained for the younger leaders of the Senate to hash out a workable compromise. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Stephen Douglas took a leading hand. He began with a ringing endorsement of popular sovereignty, “the great and fundamental principle of free government, which asserts that each community shall settle this and all other questions affecting their domestic institutions by themselves.” Douglas rejected Calhoun’s notion of southern grievances, saying that “the territories belong to the United States as one people, one nation, and are to be disposed of for the common benefit of all, according to the principles of the Constitution.” Douglas opposed spreading the Wilmot Proviso over the new western territories, calling it “a dead letter upon the statute book,” while noting, in a nod to Webster, that freedom was naturally on the march in the West, “for the area was already free by the laws of nature and of God.”11
It took six months of tedious and occasionally violent debate before the Senate was able to hammer out a compromise proposal. The new bill, dubbed the Compromise of 1850, brought California into the Union as a free state, organized New Mexico and Utah into territories under popular sovereignty, settled the final boundaries of Texas, abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Law. Throughout the deliberations, Douglas was tireless in his leadership, to the point of eating his meals at his desk and developing a painful abscess on his hip from sitting so long in one spot. Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, no admirer of Douglas, nevertheless praised his northern colleague for his labors. “If any man has a right to be proud of the success of these measures,” Davis said, “it is the senator from Illinois.” On the night of the bill’s passage, Douglas was serenaded by bandsmen in a wildly celebrating Washington. Bonfires, fireworks, and spontaneous marches took place throughout the city, and cries of “The Union is saved!” echoed off the torchlit facades of the Capitol. Douglas, called from his home, responded with a brief but optimistic speech, maintaining, “We are united from shore to shore.” He apparently took to heart the advice of one supporter that it was the duty of every patriot to get drunk—the next day, Douglas was one of several senators who missed the opening roll call in the Senate, sending word that he was prostrated with a “cold.”12
Douglas’s dogged leadership in passing the Compromise of 1850 brought him increased national renown. A delegation of grateful Californians presented him with a jewel-encrusted gold watch inscribed “California knows her friend,” and the New York Herald included him in a list of possible presidential candidates in 1852. He further raised his profile by championing a north-south railroad linking the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. The Illinois Central Railroad bill, passed in May 1850 during the height of the compromise debate, pledged the federal government to granting land and rights-of-way to the states of Illinois, Alabama, and Mississippi for construction of a railroad connecting Chicago to Mobile. It was all part of Douglas’s sweeping vision of a truly transcontinental country, linked by railroads and riverboats, which would complete the Manifest Destiny vision of James K. Polk and other expansionists. His own adopted home region would be the hub. “There is a power in this nation greater than either the North or the South,” Douglas said, “a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to the nation. That power is the country known as the great West.”13
Douglas’s visionary zeal, along with his comparative youth (he was thirty-eight), won him the support of the “Young America” wing of the Democratic Party, which was casting about for a presidential candidate to back in 1852. The leading candidates, besides Douglas, were all antiquarian in their appeal. Michigan senator Lewis Cass, the unsuccessful nominee in 1848, was joined by former secretary of war William L. Marcy, former secretary of state James Buchanan, Texas senator Sam Houston, and Mexican War general William O. Butler in the top tier of available men. All five had served in the War of 1812; Cass, if elected, would be seventy at the time of his inauguration. Douglas, with his unquenchable vigor and optimism, was a living embodiment of Young America, and his longtime residence on the edge of the frontier gave him added appeal. The next president, predicted the Herald, would come from the “great northwest,” but would have to appeal to other regions of the country as well. “There is but one man who answers to this description,” said the newspaper, recommending Douglas for “his eastern birth, his western residence and his southern marriage.”14
Despite disavowing any interest in the nomination—“I am young and can afford to wait,” he magnanimously told a Boston editor in September 1851—Douglas in reality campaigned avidly, perhaps too avidly, for the job. He was aided and abetted by a motley crew of Young Americans, led by George N. Sanders, the perfervid editor of the Democratic Review. Sanders, a native Kentuckian, had run guns to revolutionaries during the 1848 uprisings in Europe, and was said to have mounted the barricades in Paris that bloody and quixotic June. With Douglas’s support, Sanders acquired the Review “for the purposes of controlling its columns until after the presidential election.” That was all well and good, but the first issue of the journal sounded a truculent tone that alarmed Douglas and other professional politicians. “The statesmen of a previous generation,” warned Sanders, “must get out of the way” and stand aside for someone who could bring to the table “young blood, young ideas, and young hearts to the councils of the Republic.” Ensuing issues attacked the other candidates by name. Butler was “a good example of a no-policy statesman,” Marcy was “spavined, wind-blown, strained, ring-boned,” Cass was “a human contradiction,” and Buchanan was—cruelest gibe of all—“an old fogy.”15
Predictably, the old fogies struck back hard. Tennessee congressman Andrew Johnson led the charge, lambasting Douglas as “a mere hotbed production, a precocious politician, warmed into and kept in existence by a set of interested plunderers that would, in the event of success, disembowel the Treasury, disgrace the country and damn the party to all eternity that brought them into power.” The whole group, Johnson groused, was nothing more than “miserable banditti, much fitter to occupy cells in the penitentiary than places of state.” Douglas’s new home at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and I Street in Washington was nicknamed “Mount Julep” for the copious amounts of whiskey, brandy, cognac, and champagne that were said to be quaffed by the senator and his brain trust.16
The Democratic nominating convention in Baltimore quickly devolved into a three-way race among Douglas, Cass, and Buchanan. After three days, forty-eight ballots, and untold amounts of hard liquor and soft promises, the convention was hopelessly deadlocked. A true dark-horse candidate, New Hampshire politico Franklin Pierce, suddenly bolted to the front and captured the nomination. The blazingly handsome Pierce, generally considered the best-looking man ever to run for the White House, was a college friend of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who contributed in turn the best-written campaign biography of any presidential candidate. A former congressman and senator, Pierce had rushed to defend the colors in the Mexican War, but his military career was snake-bitten. He crushed his testicles against the pommel of his saddle at the Battle of Contreras, was thrown from his horse at the Battle of Churubusco, wrenched his knee en route to Mexico City, and came down with dysentery at the Battle of Chapultepec. The Whig Party, as was its wont, nominated yet another general for president, Winfield Scott. The Whigs gleefully contrasted their candidate’s sparkling war record with that of Pierce, whom they dubbed “the Fainting General.” In a witty if cruel bit of campaigning, they passed out a miniature book, one-inch-high and one-half-inch-thick, entitled The Military Services of General Pierce. Jabbing at his widely known weakness for alcohol, the Whigs mocked Pierce as “the hero of many a well-fought bottle.”17
Douglas, no mean drinker himself, shook off his disappointment over losing the nomination and promised to campaign vigorously for Pierce in the fall. He was true to his word, giving speeches in Richmond, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago. In New York, he gracefully buried the hatchet with Lewis Cass, who in a speech preceding Douglas’s appearance referred to himself self-deprecatingly as “an old fogy.” Not so, said Douglas, declaring that Cass could “not be an old fogy even should he live a thousand years.” In a nice bit of oneupmanship, he praised Cass for giving “a pure young American democratic speech.” Douglas reserved his heavy artillery for Scott, a political neophyte widely seen as the tool of William Seward and the antislavery wing of the Whig Party. Warning direly that the previous general-turned-president, Zachary Taylor, “had already committed himself to steps which would have led inevitably to a civil war,” Douglas worried that “it was only the hand of providence that saved us from our first and only military administration.” He wondered aloud how wise it was to convert “a good general into a bad president.”18
Douglas’s jibes eventually roused Lincoln from his political slumbers. In June, immediately after the nominating convention had chosen Scott for president, an exhausted and dispirited Henry Clay died in Washington at the age of seventy-five. Lincoln was one of many delivering eulogies for the man he called “my beau ideal of a statesman.” Perhaps because he could identify with his fellow Kentuckian Clay more readily than he could with a professional soldier like Taylor, Lincoln’s second public eulogy was considerably warmer than his first. Appearing at a public gathering at the House of Representatives in Springfield, Lincoln praised Clay for his eloquence, judgment, and will, adding: “The spell—the long enduring spell—with which the souls of men were bound to him, is a miracle.” Clearly thinking of his own self-educated rise, Lincoln noted that “Mr. Clay’s lack of a more perfect early education…teaches at least one profitable lesson; it teaches that in this country one can scarcely be so poor, but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.”19
Clay’s moderate stance on slavery drew Lincoln’s strongest approbation. Clay, he said, “did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the Negroes were to be excepted from the human race.” Lincoln set himself squarely on Clay’s side, even to the point of supporting the absurd notion put forth by the American Colonization Society to buy back the freedom of 3 million southern slaves and exile—one could scarcely say repatriate—them to Africa. There was no way that southern slaveholders would willingly countenance such a plan, or that northern taxpayers would pay for it if they did. Still, Lincoln claimed, the movement was gaining strength and “may it indeed be realized! Pharaoh’s country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Seas for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us!”20
Lincoln failed to work up comparable enthusiasm for the Whigs’ wheezy presidential candidate. He made few campaign speeches, the most memorable being a two-part address to the Scott Club in Springfield in which he sought to rebut Douglas’s charges that Scott was a lackey of Seward and the abolitionists. Tiresomely and ostentatiously referring to Douglas as “Judge” throughout the speech, Lincoln spent more time assailing Douglas than he did extolling Scott. Specifically, he accused Douglas of stealing both the idea and credit for the Compromise of 1850 from Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other Whigs. He also mocked him for his “wonderful acumen…on the construction of language” and for “fall[ing] into a strain of wailing pathos which Jeremiah in his last days might envy, for the old soldier democrats to be turned out of office by Gen. Scott.” It was a strained performance, reflecting perhaps Lincoln’s growing sense that Douglas had left him behind.21
Lincoln did have Douglas to thank for one thing—a substantial increase in his income. The Central Illinois Railroad bill that Douglas had shepherded through Congress brought with it a golden shower of work for lawyers across the state, and Lincoln was not shy in seeking his share, writing to the railroad’s chief solicitor in the fall of 1853: “I am now free to make an engagement for the Road; and if you think fit you may ‘count me in.’” He received a $250 retainer fee, and subsequently handled some forty cases for the railroad, including eleven appeals that he presented before the Illinois Supreme Court. Besides his obvious political connections, Lincoln had recommended himself to the railroad through his adroit handling of a lawsuit two years earlier between the Alton & Sangamon Railroad and a local landowner, James A. Barret, who had refused to pay the railroad his original subscription price after the line changed its route to bypass his property. Lincoln argued successfully that a railroad had the right to amend its plans. It was an important precedent for railroad companies throughout Illinois and the rest of the country, and it solidified Lincoln’s reputation as a skilled practitioner of railroad law.22
The most lucrative case of Lincoln’s career came via the Illinois Central Railroad. Officials in McLean County, disputing the tax exemption granted the railroad by the state legislature, levied their own tax on the company’s real estate within the county. The railroad argued that such a tax would practically force it out of business (and also open it up to similar taxation in other counties). The case eventually came before the Illinois Supreme Court in the spring of 1854. Lincoln’s former law partners, John T. Stuart and Stephen Logan, represented McLean County, while Lincoln cochaired the railroad’s case with lead attorney James F. Joy. Lincoln argued that the legislature was well within its rights to grant a tax exemption to the railroad; he cited rulings to support his argument from the states of New Jersey, Maryland, Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, along with a previous decision in Illinois itself. After nearly two years of arguments and counterarguments, the high court ruled in favor of the railroad. Lincoln submitted a bill of $2,000 for his and Herndon’s services. Remarkably, the railroad balked at paying, complaining that “This is as much as Daniel Webster himself would have charged.” Undeterred, Lincoln submitted a revised bill for $5,000. At a hearing before his friend David Davis, Lincoln argued that he had saved the railroad over half a million dollars a year in local taxes. Davis ruled in Lincoln’s favor.23
Other than his anti-Douglas tirade in Springfield, Lincoln campaigned very little for Scott in the fall of 1852. Sensing the electoral debacle to come, he “did less in this Presidential struggle than any in which he had ever engaged,” author William Dean Howells later noted in a campaign biography of Lincoln. As it turned out, Lincoln was right. Scott lost to Pierce in a landslide, carrying only four states and losing in the Electoral College 254 to 42. Democrats were exultant, making good on their campaign boast: “We Polked ’em in ’44; we’ll Pierce ’em in ’52.” The party gained seventeen seats in the House of Representatives, won nine of twelve governorships, and strengthened its hold on state legislatures, which still elected U.S. senators. In Illinois, Douglas swept to reelection, winning seventy-five of ninety-five votes. The obligatory victory party, held in the statehouse for 1,500 supporters, was another “brilliant levee,” even if the honoree was forced to pay for a new carpet in the Senate chamber.24
Returning to Washington, Douglas was confident of playing a large role in the new Pierce administration—there was even talk of a cabinet appointment. He drew up a list of friends he wanted to see rewarded with government posts currently held by Whigs. “Reform must begin with the incumbents in office,” he growled. “I shall act on the rule of giving the offices to those who fight the battles.” The president-elect did not share Douglas’s priorities. If anything, Pierce went out of his way to ignore Douglas and his supporters. Douglas watched in disgust as Pierce filled his cabinet with a number of the senator’s bitterest enemies, including Jefferson Davis, who was named secretary of war, and James Buchanan, who was appointed minister to Great Britain. Douglas had to content himself with delivering the keynote address at the January 1853 unveiling of the equestrian statue to his hero, Andrew Jackson, in Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House, where his past and future enemies would sit.25
As it turned out, political appointments were soon the least of Douglas’s worries. His wife, Martha, had just given birth to the couple’s third child, a daughter, in Chicago, but the initial elation over the new arrival quickly gave way to despair. Martha developed serious postnatal complications, and Douglas rushed to her side. On January 19, she died at the age of twenty-eight; their daughter died a month later. Douglas, “more depressed in feeling than I ever saw him before,” in the view of kinsman David Reid, brought Martha home to North Carolina to be buried in the Martin family plot. The Senate adjourned to allow members to attend the funeral. Douglas returned to Washington almost immediately, leaving his elder son, Robbie, in the care of his grandmother, but it was clear to everyone that Douglas’s heart was not in his work. Installing his sister and brother-in-law, Sarah and Julius Granger, in his house to care for his younger son, Stevie, Douglas embarked on a five-month-long tour of Europe. His first stop, in London, created something of a diplomatic stir when he refused to don the appropriate court dress for an audience with Queen Victoria. Douglas insisted, instead, on wearing clothing “appropriate to a visit with an American president.” The queen was not amused, and the planned meeting did not take place.26
From England, Douglas’s journeys took him eastward to France, Italy, Greece, Smyrna, and Constantinople. In Rome, a rumor arose that he was planning to renounce his Protestant faith and convert to Catholicism. Opposition newspapers rushed to accuse him of cynical political purposes, including a nefarious plan to corner the Catholic vote in the next presidential election. The Providence Journal joked that if the rumor were true, the pope would do well to watch Douglas, lest he make “St. Peter’s chair elective once in four years, and…present himself as a candidate for the next succession.” In St. Petersburg, the senator was taken to meet Czar Nicholas I, who was in the midst of secret military maneuvers in preparation for a war with Turkey. The two men hit it off famously. Douglas considered Russia “the most charming country in all Europe,” and Nicholas assured his visitor that Russia and the United States were the only two “proper governments” in the world—all the rest were “mongrels” who were destined to be overrun by the younger, more vibrant giants. On his return trip across the continent, Douglas subsequently had an audience with Napoléon III and Queen Eugénie of France, who quizzed him closely about America’s possible designs on Cuba but neglected to tell him about their own designs on Mexico. His various meetings with European royalty, while personally gratifying, did not sway Douglas from his democratic tendencies. “We in America,” he observed, “are accustomed to spend money for works of utility, not on those of mere ornament, pomp, and show.”27
Douglas returned in October 1853 to a political party increasingly riven by conflict. Franklin Pierce, after a promising beginning, had run into opposition on all sides for his temporizing and ineffectual leadership. Northern Democrats were unhappy with the large role that proslavery southerners were playing in the administration, while southerners resented Pierce’s forgiving embrace of wayward abolitionists. Both factions jockeyed incessantly for position in Washington, and the ever-smiling, ever-affable president met each visitor to the White House with a firm handshake and a twinkling eye, which seemed to suggest approval but in truth represented nothing more than a weak man’s need to avoid unpleasantness. Missouri Democrat Samuel Treat (no relation to the Illinois jurist of the same name) complained to Douglas soon after his return “that cowardice, bad advice or something worse renders it impossible for any good to come out of this administration.” Another Missourian, Congressman James B. Bowlin, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, was even harsher in his analysis. “His efforts have entirely failed to unite the party,” Bowlin wrote of the president. “It is torn into shreds and tatters.”28
Given Pierce’s all-too-evident political weakness, Douglas’s supporters called on him to reassume a leading role in the Senate and signal his intention to run for president in 1856. The Little Giant at first demurred. “The party is in a distracted condition,” he warned Chicago editor Charles Lanphier, “and it requires all our wisdom, prudence and energy to consolidate its power and perpetuate its principles.” Having learned a harsh lesson during the previous campaign about seeming too eager to win the nomination, Douglas wanted now to hang back and let events take their course. “I shall remain entirely non-committal, and hold myself at liberty to do whatever my duty to my principles and my friends may require when the time for action arrives,” he explained. “Our first duty is to the cause—the fate of individual politicians is of minor consequence. Let us leave the presidency out of view at least two years to come.”29
Events, however, did not give Douglas the luxury of waiting. After much wrangling, Congress finally approved a measure to fund a transcontinental railroad, and army surveyors branched out to map proposed routes from which the president would select the most suitable. Douglas, favoring the northernmost route, stayed in close communication with Captain Isaac I. Stevens, who was in charge of the mapping expedition from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Puget Sound in Washington Territory. Stevens assured Douglas that the northerly route was imminently feasible, and Douglas quietly purchased 6,000 acres of land at the terminus of the proposed route on the western shores of Lake Superior. Together with other members of a business syndicate, Douglas divided shares in a new township to be named Superior City (now Superior, Wisconsin). The property quickly appreciated in value to $20,000 per lot.30
Any route to California across the northern or central part of the country would necessarily pass through unincorporated territory. Douglas, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, understood this; for the past decade he had been attempting to organize the vast area between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains into the spread-eagled Nebraska Territory. At the same time, he had also encouraged free homestead policies, a new telegraph line, and overland mail service, as well as the colonization of immigrant trails along the way. “It is utterly impossible to preserve that connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific,” Douglas advised, “if you are to keep a wilderness of two thousand miles in extent between you.” Southerners, however, were in no hurry to create another territory north of the Missouri Compromise line, particularly one with the prospect of wielding as much political and financial clout as Nebraska. Missouri senator David Atchison, leading the opposition, made his views clear. “I am free to admit that at this moment, at this hour, and for all time to come I should oppose the organization of the settlement of the territory,” Atchison said, “unless my constituents and the constituents of the whole South…could go into it upon the same footing, with equal rights and equal privileges, carrying that species of property with them.” He would see Nebraska “sink in hell,” Atchison warned, before he saw it admitted to the Union as a free state.31
Faced with such intransigence, Douglas sought to find a workable middle ground. In January 1854 he proposed a bill that would divide the new territory into two parts: Nebraska Territory, west of Iowa, and Kansas Territory, west of Missouri. In theory, this would create a new free state, Nebraska, and a new slave state, Kansas, based on the preferences of their closest neighbors. The ultimate decision, however, would be left in the hands of the residents, in accordance with the popular sovereignty clause of the Compromise of 1850. Grudgingly, Douglas agreed to an eleventh-hour amendment to his bill by Kentucky senator Archibald Dixon, a southern Whig who called for the formal repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the new territories. Douglas tried to talk Dixon out of such explosive language, warning that it would “raise a hell of a storm,” but Atchison and other southern senators insisted on the change. Against his better judgment, Douglas yielded the point, although he demanded a personal meeting with President Pierce to ensure White House approval of the bill. Jefferson Davis, whose newfound support of Douglas should have raised warning hackles on the Little Giant’s neck, pointed out that Pierce did not generally receive visitors on Sunday. Douglas insisted. The president, roused from his self-imposed cloister, listened to the new bill as it was read aloud, pronounced himself satisfied with the language, shook hands all around, and went back to bed, having committed his administration to the most sweeping and controversial change in public law in more than three decades.32
The storm that Douglas had predicted was not long in coming. The day after he introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill in the Senate, a small group of abolitionist lawmakers released an incendiary statement of their own to the press. Wordily (and misleadingly) titled “The Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States,” the piece appeared first in the National Era, the Washington-based mouthpiece for the abolitionist movement. The document was largely the work of Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase, although it was also toiled over by Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner and congressmen Joshua Giddings of Ohio, Gerrit Smith of New York, and Alexander De Witt of Massachusetts. In the overwrought language favored by the antislavery movement, the document began: “We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own state, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism inhabited by masters and slaves.” The appeal went on to accuse Douglas of hatching a “monstrous” and “discreditable” plot to spread “the blight of slavery” across the land and “subjugate the whole country to the yoke of a slaveholding despotism.” His opponents said Douglas had sponsored the bill purely to advance his presidential ambitions.33
Douglas hit back hard. On January 30, he rose in the Senate to confront his accusers. Before a jam-packed audience of senators, congressmen, journalists, and visitors, Douglas pointed out that he had planned to introduce the bill a week earlier, but that Chase, “with a smiling face and the appearance of friendship,” had asked for a postponement, knowing full well that the National Era was about to release his anti-Douglas screed. “Little did I suppose at the time that I granted that act of courtesy,” said Douglas, “that they had drafted and published to the world a document…in which they arraigned me as having been guilty of a criminal betrayal of my trust, as having been guilty of an act of bad faith, and being engaged in an atrocious plot against the cause of free government.” Conveniently overlooking the fact that he had called on the president the previous Sunday, Douglas indicted Chase and his “Abolition confederates” for meeting “on the holy Sabbath, while other senators were engaged in divine worship…. This was done on the Sabbath day, and by a set of politicians, to advance their own political and ambitious purposes, in the name of our holy religion.”34
The core of the debate, as Douglas had anticipated, concerned the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise. Artfully, he argued that the earlier agreement had been superseded by the Compromise of 1850, which he called “a great principle of self-government…. Let all this quibbling about the Missouri Compromise…be cast behind you,” he urged, “for the simple question is, will you allow the people to legislate for themselves upon the subject of slavery?” It was a smooth piece of statesmanship, but Douglas undercut his own case by losing his temper and calling Chase and Sumner “pure, unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soilism, Niggerism in the Congress of the United States.” When Chase attempted to respond, Douglas roared, “I will yield the floor to no Abolitionist!” and accused the Ohioan of attempting to foment “another political tornado of fanaticism.”35
In that, at least, Douglas was right. The two sides had indeed unleashed a political tornado, and soon the entire country was consumed by the swirling winds. While the Senate debated the Kansas-Nebraska bill, outside events conspired to sharpen—if that were possible—the partisan divide. That March, a slave named Anthony Burns escaped from his master in Virginia and stowed away on a ship bound for Boston. There he found work as a tailor and ill-advisedly wrote to his brother, who was still a slave, to join him. Their owner intercepted the letter and immediately set off to recover his property. Burns was arrested and held at the federal courthouse, where a group of abolitionist vigilantes led by the rather nonpacific Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson stormed the building with pistols, axes, and a battering ram and attempted to rescue the fugitive slave. Shots were exchanged and a deputy marshal was killed. President Pierce immediately ordered 2,000 federal troops into the city; a revenue cutter stood ready in the harbor to speed Burns’s return to Virginia. While a marine band played “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” Burns was escorted in chains through the streets of Boston as sullen residents draped their buildings in black crepe, hung American flags upside down, and tolled lugubrious church bells in protest. The $100,000 it cost the government to keep Burns in custody (about $3 million today) made him, Higginson scoffed, “the most expensive slave in the history of mankind.”36
While the Burns melodrama played out in Boston, lawmakers in Washington thrashed over the details of Douglas’s bill. Posturing and demagoguery were the rules of the day. Texas senator Sam Houston warned that a “wall of fire” would descend on the South if the Missouri Compromise was repealed. North Carolina senator George E. Badger wondered plaintively: “If some southern gentleman wishes to take the nurse who takes charge of his little baby, or the old woman who nursed him in childhood, and whom he calls ‘Mammy’…into one of these new territories…why, in the name of God, should anybody prevent it?” Ohio senator Ben Wade responded that he had no objection to Badger immigrating to Kansas with his “old Mammy. We only insist that he shall not be empowered to sell her after taking her there.”37
After his initial combative appearance, Douglas stayed carefully behind the scenes, strong-arming the undecided and shoring up the faithful. Finally, on March 3, he brought the bill to the floor for a final vote. Debate continued for more than ten hours before Douglas rose to make his final argument at 11:30 that night. In a reprise of his earlier assault, the Little Giant pitched into Chase, Sumner, Seward, and other abolitionists who opposed the measure. For over three hours he hotly held forth, liberally spicing his remarks with “By Gods” and “God damns” while supporters such as California senator William Gwin rapped out approval on the wooden floor with their canes. Alluding to the fact that both Chase and Sumner had been elected to the Senate by compromise coalitions, Douglas mocked: “I did not obtain my seat in this body by a corrupt bargain or a dishonorable coalition. I did not enter into any combinations or arrangements by which my character, my principles, and my honors, were set up at public auction or private sale in order to procure a seat in the Senate.” When Seward attempted to interrupt, Douglas drowned him out with a scathing “Ah, you can’t crawl behind that free-nigger dodge.” Seward retorted piously: “Douglas, no man will ever be president of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two gs.”38
It was nearly 5:00 a.m. on March 4 when the vote was called. The conclusion was foregone—Douglas’s bill passed the Senate, 37–14. It took another ten weeks for the bill to move through the House, where Douglas’s protégé William Richardson tenaciously shepherded its advance. Georgia congressman Alexander Stephens, who at five feet tall was even shorter than Douglas, assisted manfully in the proceedings. On May 22, the House passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act by a comparatively narrow margin of 113–100. Eight days later, the president signed the bill into law. Initially, Douglas was happy to take full credit for the bill. “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself,” he said immodestly. “I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses.” Soon he would have reason to wonder about the efficacy, if not the wisdom, of that claim.39
Every action, large or small, has unintended consequences, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act was larger than most. For Douglas personally, no single consequence was more significant than the sudden return of Abraham Lincoln to politics. With the exception of his lukewarm appearances for Winfield Scott during the 1852 presidential campaign, Lincoln had been content to mind his legal career and leave the politicking to others. Still, he followed the debate intently in the newspapers, and one morning friends found him sitting distractedly before a guttering fireplace in a hotel lobby, having stayed up all night pondering the increasingly parlous state of affairs. Lincoln was in Urbana handling a case when news flashed across the telegraph wire that the Senate had passed the Kansas-Nebraska bill. “We were thunderstruck and stunned,” he recalled a few months later. Typically, Lincoln did not react immediately, but spent several months carefully studying the legal and moral ramifications of the act. When Kentucky abolitionist Cassius Clay came to Springfield that July to call for a new political organization to put down “the gigantic evil which threatened…their own liberty,” Lincoln lounged noncommittally on the grass, whittling a stick and listening carefully.40
Others in the North were not so calm. The Compromise of 1850 had never set well with abolitionists, who feared that the concept of popular sovereignty could be perverted by a handful of temporary immigrants flooding into a territory. Already that seemed to be happening in Kansas, where proslavery advocates called “Pukes” had begun trickling across the border from Missouri. “We are organizing,” Senator David Atchison told Jefferson Davis confidentially. “We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to ‘Mormonize’ the abolitionists”—a reference to the forcible eviction of Stephen Douglas’s old friends from Missouri fifteen years earlier. (Why Davis, as the sitting secretary of war, did not consider this threat alarming is self-evident in retrospect.) Meanwhile, Boston industrialist Amos Lawrence had begun underwriting an ambitious free-soil movement, the New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the purpose of inducing hardy New Englanders to take their families, their plows, and their antislavery values westward to Kansas. In his honor, a new settlement was christened Lawrence. It would soon be heard from on the national scene.41
In Washington, Massachusetts senator Julius Rockwell presented a petition signed by 2,900 citizens calling for the revocation of the Fugitive Slave Law. Charles Sumner chimed in with the opinion that “if the Union be in any way dependent on an act so revolting in every regard, then it ought not to exist.” Southerners predictably howled in protest. Alabama senator Clement Clay castigated Sumner as “a leper, a serpent, and a filthy reptile.” Virginia’s James M. Mason observed that Sumner’s “reason is dethroned.” A nasty clash of words between Sumner and South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler would plant the seeds for one of the most discreditable acts in Senate history. Meanwhile, Connecticut author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, continued to educate—some said mislead—readers on the evils of slavery.42
Douglas, who had hoped to put the issue to rest, was caught off guard by the violent reaction to his bill. Five state legislatures—in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin—passed resolutions condemning the act. A Democratic convention in Stowe’s Connecticut also opposed the bill, and other party organizations in the East and the Midwest withheld formal support for the measure. The Detroit Democrat, in something of a record for personal calumny, slandered Douglas as “the Illinois man stealer—the mean wretch who misrepresents a nominally free state in the American Senate, while upon his southern plantations the bloody scourge is daily falling by his command upon woman’s shrinking flesh—who trades in little children, and overtasks and scourges gray-headed men, that the stock of wines and brandies which his depraved appetite demands may be abundant.”43
Douglas could shrug off such overheated journalistic attacks, but he was greatly alarmed by reports of political defections among the party faithful back home. As early as mid-March, a crowd of young toughs in Chicago had burned him in effigy in the city square. When the Senate adjourned in August, Douglas set out on a brief speaking tour, explaining his views on popular sovereignty in general and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in particular. His reception was decidedly mixed. Opponents of the bill shadowed him at every stop, and in his adopted hometown of Chicago a howling mob heckled him into submission before he had the chance to speak. “Abolitionists of Chicago,” he jeered. “It is now Sunday morning. I’ll go to church and you may go to Hell.” Later, more composed, he remembered: “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.” Missouri congressman Thomas Benton, a longtime foe, gleefully summed up Douglas’s troubles. “His legs are too short,” said Benton. “That part of his body…which men wish to kick, is too near the ground.”44
One of those waiting to do the kicking, figuratively at least, was Abraham Lincoln. The pro-Democrat Illinois State Register reported in August that Lincoln “had been nosing for weeks in the State Library, pumping his brain and his imagination for points and arguments” to use against Douglas. Like old war horses, the two men were gearing up for the state’s annual legislative elections. Lincoln, against his better judgment, had been talked into running again for the legislature—a distinct step down after his term in Congress, but one that fellow Whigs believed was necessary to hold on to the seat in Sangamon County. In Bloomington, the old rivals crossed paths for the first time in years. After speaking to a party gathering, Lincoln paid a courtesy call on Douglas, who was convivially sharing a decanter of red liquor with friends in his hotel suite. “Mr. Lincoln, won’t you take something?” Douglas asked. “No, I think not,” Lincoln replied. “What! Are you a member of the Temperance Society?” Douglas joked. “No, I am not a member of any temperance society,” said Lincoln, joining the fun, “but I am temperate, in this, that I don’t drink anything.”45
The jokes soon ended, and Lincoln and Douglas resumed their partisan political warfare. For several weeks, Lincoln attempted to engage Douglas in debate, but the Little Giant was understandably reluctant to share a public forum with his old-time rival, whom he termed “the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met.” At the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, however, Lincoln found an opening. On October 3, Douglas arrived to speak at the fair, but a sudden rain shower forced the event indoors at the statehouse. After Douglas spoke for two and a half hours on behalf of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln appeared on the stairway outside and announced that he would respond the next day to the senator’s remarks. In the spirit of fairness, he invited Douglas to share the stage. October 4 was unusually hot, and Lincoln’s face was bathed in sweat as he went to the table at the front of the hall and took out a long, handwritten speech. Douglas sat directly in front of the speaker’s stand. After a little banter with “his distinguished friend, Judge Douglas,” Lincoln launched into his address. The next stage of his career was about to begin.46
For three hours Lincoln unburdened himself of a thoughtful if sometimes rambling analysis of slavery in America, a practice, he said, that the Founding Fathers had kept hidden in the Constitution “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” The founders had expected slavery to die out on its own accord, he argued, and they had attempted to hem it into “the narrowest limits of necessity” through such compacts as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the Old Northwest, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The latter, a “sacred compact,” had held the nation together for more than thirty years, until Douglas and his minions had rammed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “This took us by surprise,” Lincoln said. “We reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.”47
The target of all this slashing, Lincoln said, was the concept of popular sovereignty, which he condemned as a fraudulent device intended to spread slavery into “every part of the wide world.” It was true that people had the right to decide their local laws, he admitted, whether they were “the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of Indiana.” But slavery was another matter altogether—it required deciding nothing less than “whether a Negro is not or is a man.” Douglas, said Lincoln, “has no very vivid impression that the Negro is human; and consequently has no idea that there can be any moral question in legislating about him.” But the Declaration of Independence had said that all men were created equal, and “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent. When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the Negro is a man…there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”48
Concluding with an emotional appeal to “lovers of liberty everywhere” to readopt the Declaration of Independence and “join the great and good work” of limiting the spread of slavery into new territories, Lincoln ended his speech to a torrent of applause. Men hurrahed and thumped the floor, and women waved their white handkerchiefs in the air. Douglas gave a lengthy rebuttal, but in the admittedly partisan view of Billy Herndon, “Douglas was completely cut down by Lincoln and…felt himself overthrown.” Emboldened by Lincoln’s address, local antislavery radicals Ichabod Codding and Owen Lovejoy announced plans to hold a meeting in Springfield that very night to organize a new Republican party in the state. (Lincoln did not attend.) The next day, veteran Democratic politician Lyman Trumbull, who was married to Mary Lincoln’s best friend, Julia Jayne, publicly denounced Douglas and declared himself a candidate for Congress on the anti-Nebraska ticket. At the urging of other Whigs, Lincoln continued to press Douglas, trailing him across the state for the next two weeks and giving, in essence, the same speech he gave at Springfield. Having been proved right, yet again, in his analysis of Lincoln’s effectiveness on the stump, Douglas did not repeat the mistake of sharing the same stage with his rival, even going so far as pleading laryngitis at one point to avoid answering Lincoln’s challenge.49
In the end, the political firestorm that Douglas had feared wound up scorching northern Democrats everywhere. The party’s free-state representation in Congress fell from ninety-three to twenty-two seats, and Democrats kept control of only two northern state legislatures. Of the forty-four northern Democrats who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska bill, only seven were reelected. Antislavery forces, including a crazy-quilt conglomeration of anti-Nebraska Democrats, Conscience Whigs, nativist Know-Nothings, and newly minted Republicans, won nearly half of the seats in the upcoming Thirty-fourth Congress. In Illinois, the Democratic Party lost control of the statehouse, as well as five of nine House seats. Douglas’s friend William Richardson, who managed to hold on to his seat, ascribed the party’s poor showing to “a torrent of abolitionism, whigism, free-soilism, religious bigotry, and intolerance, all joined in a wild and wicked foray upon the democratic party and the constitution.” More to the point, perhaps, Illinois senator James Shields simply noted that “the Anti Nebraska feeling is too deep—more than I thought it was.”50
Shields had good reason to worry. In February 1855, the newly constituted state legislature met in Springfield to decide his fate. From Washington, Douglas declared that Shields must be supported to the bitter end, despite the fact that pro-Nebraska Democrats were now in the minority. “Our friends in the legislature,” he advised, “should nominate Shields by acclamation, and nail his flag to the mast, and never haul it down under any circumstances nor for anybody.” Once again, Douglas’s oldest enemy reared his head. Lincoln had resigned his new seat in the legislature, which he had not wanted to begin with, in order to qualify for the Senate (no sitting legislator was eligible). For weeks, Lincoln campaigned inexhaustibly for the post, writing letters to potential supporters, buttonholing lawmakers in the halls of the statehouse, and sleeping on the sofa of his office. Counting heads, Lincoln estimated that he had twenty-six sure votes going into the election; he needed twenty-five more to return to Washington. Old friends David Davis, Stephen Logan, and Ward Hill Lamon came aboard to help in the effort, but others abandoned Lincoln in favor of more radical anti-Nebraska candidates. Charles H. Ray, part-owner of the Chicago Tribune, dragged Mary Lincoln into the fight, writing: “I must confess I am afraid of ‘Abe.’ He is Southern by birth, Southern in his associations and Southern, if I mistake not, in his sympathies. His wife, you know, is a Todd, or a pro-slavery family, and so are all his kin.”51
A brutal snowstorm, the worst since 1831, delayed the vote for twelve days. When it finally took place on February 8, Lincoln came within a whisker of winning on the first ballot, totaling forty-five votes. Shields had forty-one, but the balance of power was held by Congressman-elect Lyman Trumbull, who steadily rose from five votes to thirty-five. Always politically astute, Lincoln could read the handwriting on the wall. Trumbull’s supporters, he said, were “men who never could vote for a Whig, and without the votes of two of whom I never could reach the requisite number to make an election.” When the Douglas Democrats suddenly switched from Shields to a popular moderate, Governor Joel Matteson, Lincoln threw his votes behind Trumbull to prevent a Democratic triumph. Logan burst into tears when he got the instructions. “Disappointed and mortified,” Lincoln told old friend Joseph Gillespie that he would never run for office again, since “he could bear defeat inflicted by his enemies with a pretty good grace—but it was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.”52
That night Lincoln attended a reception at the home of his brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, which had been planned ahead of time to celebrate Lincoln’s victory. Instead, he found himself congratulating “my friend Trumbull” and taking wan satisfaction in having frustrated the plans of Douglas and the Democrats. Mary Lincoln, who had watched the catastrophe from the House gallery, was not so gracious. Denouncing Trumbull’s “sordid, selfish nature,” she snubbed both him and his wife, her old friend Julia Jayne. She would never speak to either of them again. As for Douglas, he greeted the news of Trumbull’s victory with pained incredulity. Trumbull’s claims to be a Democrat—anti-Nebraska or not—“will be news to the Democracy of Illinois,” said Douglas. “How can a man who was elected as an Abolition-Know-Nothing, come here and claim to be a Democrat in good standing?” It was a question that, one way or another, both he and Lincoln would have to answer in the months to come. For the time being, each man licked his wounds and moved on. When next they faced each other in combat, the whole country would be watching.53