“Our Fathers”: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the Purpose of America
They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence. . . .
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, SPEECH IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, 1857
In June 1858, Lincoln was about to accept the Republican nomination for Senate. Parties usually didn’t endorse candidates until after the election of state legislators, who, in the days before the Seventeenth Amendment provided for direct election of senators, decided who would represent their state in the U.S. Senate. But Illinois Republicans wanted to make a point. The party’s power brokers back east had been flirting with Stephen Douglas after he broke with Southern Democrats. The state party made its zeal for Lincoln unmistakable at an enthusiastic convention in Springfield. It declared him “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”
Lincoln knew this moment was coming, since support had been steadily building for him in county conventions. He spent a month preparing his speech, according to Herndon. He wrote notes on “slips, put these slips in his hat, numbering them, and when he was done with the ideas, he gathered up the scraps, put them in the right order, and wrote out his speech.” A few days before the event, Springfield Republican John Armstrong recalled, Lincoln gathered some friends “in the Library Room in the State house in the city of Springfield, for the purpose of getting their opinion of the policy of delivering that Speech.”
Eight or twelve of them sat at a round table and Lincoln read what would become its immortal House Divided opening passage: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” He read the beginning “slowly & cautiously so as to let Each man fully understand it.” The reaction around the table was cool, to say the least. “Every Man among them,” Armstrong told Herndon later, “Condemned the speech in Substance & Spirit,” and the House Divided language “as unwise & impolitic, if not false.”
About it being impolitic, they were indisputably correct. Stephen Douglas came back to Lincoln’s House Divided language again and again during the campaign as proof Lincoln was a radical bent on disunion.
One interpretation of the speech is that Lincoln was playing chess when everyone else was playing checkers, and already had his eye on the presidential race in 1860 rather than the lowly Senate race in 1858. Historian Don Fehrenbacher notes how fanciful it is to believe Lincoln was anything but deadly intent on beating Douglas in the race at hand. He points to a campaign strategy memo Lincoln wrote categorizing and breaking down the 1856 vote by each legislative district. After pages of tabulation, Lincoln writes:
By this, it is seen, we give up the districts numbered 1.2.3. 4.5.7.8.10.11.15.16.17.18.19.20.23.28.29.&30, with 22 representatives—
We take to ourselves, without question 37.40.42.43.44.45. 46.47.48.49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.57.& 58. with 27 representatives—
Put as doubtful, and to be struggled for, 6.9.12.13.14.21.22.24.25.26.27.31.32.33.34.35.36.38.39& 41. with 26 representatives”
These aren’t the calculations of someone blithely unconcerned with victory.
Lincoln delivered the House Divided speech because he wanted to accentuate his difference with Douglas, but more fundamentally because he believed it. The sentiment wasn’t new for him. In a scorching 1855 letter to the Kentuckian George Robertson, Lincoln vented his despair over achieving the peaceful extinction of slavery. He concluded, “Our political problem now is ‘Can we, as a nation, continue together permanently—forever—half slave, and half free?’ The problem is too mighty for me.” T. Lyle Dickey, an Illinois lawyer and politico, recalled hearing Lincoln say much the same thing at a political meeting in the fall of 1856. Dickey told Herndon, “After the Meeting was over—Mr Lincoln & I returned to Pike House—where we occupied the Same room—Immediately on reaching the room I said to Mr Lincoln—‘What in God’s name could induce you to promulgate such an opinion.’ ”
In Lincoln’s view, at stake in the debate with Douglas and with apologists for slavery was what he called our “central idea,” upon which our government ultimately depends. We could either stay true to the idea bequeathed to us by 1776, or resort to a new one accommodating slavery’s spread and its permanent place in our national life. That was the choice. For his part, Lincoln planted his flag firmly in the Declaration of Independence.
“I believe the declara[tion] that ‘all men are created equal’ is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest,” Lincoln wrote in an 1858 letter. It had made America a land of individual effort and advancement and, therefore, of stupendous abundance. “We are a great empire,” Lincoln said in a speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856. “We are eighty years old. We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity, and we shall understand that to give up that one thing, would be to give up all future prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”
In the Senate contest in 1858, Lincoln waged a fight to preserve and to extend that “one thing.” He happened to be doing it in a campaign against the man he had debated, envied, and scorned throughout his career. This latest iteration of the Lincoln-Douglas struggle implicated the deepest ideals of the republic. Douglas, too, was a railroad man. He shepherded the bill to passage granting Illinois the land for the Illinois Central. Douglas, too, wanted to see the country grow, and in fact was more enthusiastic about its westward expansion than was Lincoln. Douglas agitated for a transcontinental railroad and a tide of settlers sweeping toward the Pacific. He sounded just like Lincoln when, shortly after his arrival in Illinois, he wrote back east, in fulsome praise of the state’s potential: “Illinois possesses more natural advantages, and is destined to possess greater artificial and acquired advantages, than any other state in the union or on the globe.”
The question between the two wasn’t the country’s economic policies or its extent, so much as its very nature, the basis on which the House Divided would be made whole. Lincoln insisted that it be on the ground of the Declaration, which he considered the acid test for the American Dream, the Great Writ of American aspiration, the timeless guarantor of the equality of opportunity that would elevate all through the workings of commercial enterprise. In the ensuing existential crisis of the union, Lincoln translated into national gospel his vision of a republic of striving.
Stephen Douglas’s background made him more natural Whig material than did Lincoln’s. Douglas came from Vermont, and was the son of a doctor. He had been educated in a preparatory school in a pedagogical splendor unknown to Lincoln. But he, too, had to struggle to rise and found his way upward through the law and politics. His father died when he was an infant. When his mother moved in with her brother, Douglas had to work for his uncle as a laborer and didn’t appreciate the arrangement any more than Lincoln would have. As a young man, he headed west and arrived in Illinois via Cleveland and St. Louis not too long after Lincoln, with just a couple of bucks in his pocket. When he left home, he supposedly told his mother, who was curious when he would be back to visit, “On my way to Congress, Mother.”
Despite his New England roots, Douglas embraced the hero of the West, Andrew Jackson, and the populism of his Democratic Party. He had fallen for Jackson back in Vermont during the campaign of 1828. “From this moment,” he remembered, “my politics became fixed, and all subsequent reading, reflection and observation have but confirmed my early attachment to the cause of Democracy.” In the 1830s, he declared, “in this country there are two opposing parties,” on one side “the advocates of the rights of the people” and on the other “the advocates of the privileges of Property.”
At five feet, four inches tall, with remarkably short legs, Douglas was all energy and aggression, “a perfect steam engine in breeches,” as one fellow lawyer put it. Reckless and risk-taking by nature, Douglas was ferociously ambitious. He got himself selected as a state’s attorney within about a year of becoming a lawyer.
The paths of the two young politicians in a hurry constantly intersected. Mary Todd had flirted with Douglas back when she was single. Ninian Edwards told Herndon how Lincoln at one point fell for his comely young cousin, Matilda Edwards. She fielded a score of entreaties for marriage, including, according to Edwards, from Douglas, whom “she refused . . . on the grounds of his bad morals.”
Lincoln and Douglas served in the state legislature together. By that time, Douglas was already known as the “Little Giant,” although his opponents mocked him as the “Peoria Bantling.” In a sly reference to his diminutive stature, Lincoln wrote to a fellow Whig legislator in 1837: “We have adopted it as part of our policy here, to never speak of Douglass at all. Is’nt that the best mode of treating so small a matter?” (Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton would once say of Douglas that “his legs are too short, sir. That part of his body, sire, which men wish to kick, is too near the ground!”)
The two met often on the rhetorical battlefield. Before there were the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, there were Lincoln-Douglas debates. A newspaper report recorded a Lincoln stop in Tremont, Illinois, during the 1858 campaign: “He went through with a rapid account of the times when he had advocated the doctrines of the Whig party in Tazewell County during the successive campaigns of 1840–’44–’48 and ’52, and alluded to the fact that he had often met Douglas upon the very steps upon which he was speaking, before as now to oppose his political doctrines.”
When Lincoln’s law partner John Stuart ran against Douglas for Congress in 1838 (beating him by all of thirty-six votes), Lincoln berated the Democrat in anonymous letters in the Sangamo Journal that Douglas denounced for their “vindictive, fiendish spirit.” Lincoln did all he could to get Stuart over the top and may even have taken his place at a debate in Bloomington when his friend was ill.
In late 1839, in the run-up to the presidential campaign in the coming year, the political banter between the Whigs and Democrats hanging around the Springfield store owned by Joshua Speed became particularly heated. According to Herndon, Douglas “sprang up and abruptly made a challenge to those who differed with him to discuss the whole matter publicly, remarking that, ‘This store is no place to talk politics.’ ” Lincoln participated in the ensuing debates. In an initial contest, Douglas beat him badly. Lincoln “left the stump literally whipped off of it,” a Democratic newspaper happily related, “even in the estimation of his own friends.”
Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon about the episode: “He was very sensitive where he thought he had failed to come up to the expectations of his friends. I remember a case. He was pitted by the Whigs in 1840 to debate with Mr Douglass the Democratic champion. Lincoln did not come up to the requirements of the occasion. He was conscious of his failure and I never saw any man so much distressed. He begged to be permitted to try it again and was reluctantly indulged and in the next effort he transcended our highest expectations.”
This was Lincoln’s widely praised and reproduced speech filleting the Van Buren independent Treasury plan. He began by noting the small audience present. “I am, indeed, apprehensive,” he said, “that the few who have attended, have done so, more to spare me of mortification, than in the hope of being interested in any thing I may be able to say. This circumstance casts a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome during the evening. But enough of preface.”
After lashing the Van Buren proposal, Lincoln reserved some of his firepower for Douglas at the end. He recalled a Douglas speech on an earlier night justifying the expenditures of the Van Buren administration: “Those who heard Mr. Douglass, recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me. ‘Now he’s got me,’ thought I.” Then, Lincoln said he realized that the reasons proffered by Douglas for the spending were “untrue” or even “supremely ridiculous.” He said he then realized that he had nothing to worry about: “when I saw that he was stupid enough to hope, that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to go unexposed, I readily consented, that on the score both of veracity and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more deserving of the world’s contempt.”
A minor triumph for Lincoln, but nothing to compare to the continual rise of Stephen Douglas, who was prodigiously talented and unbelievably successful. He became the state’s youngest secretary of state in 1840, right before being named to the state’s supreme court. (He liked to be called “judge” ever after.) He arrived in the House of Representatives four years before Lincoln and got promoted to the Senate in 1846 at the same time Lincoln was elected to his one unremarkable and unsatisfying term in the House, where he languished as a freshman in the back of the chamber on “Cherokee Strip.” Such was Lincoln’s obscurity that the Republican politician John Wentworth wrote to Herndon that when Lincoln was nominated for president, “few of his old [congressional] colleagues remembered him,” and “Speaker Winthrop, of his own party, is said to have asserted . . . that he would not recognize [him] if he should meet him in the street.”
By 1852, Douglas was a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, finishing third at the convention. Lincoln was out of office back in Illinois, lamenting of Douglas, “time was when I was in his way some.” Now, he commented, “such small men as I, can hardly be considered as worthy of his notice; & I may have to dodge & get between his legs.”
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in 1854, repealing the Missouri Compromise, Douglas was in the midst of the national debate, indeed driving the national debate, while Lincoln was practicing law. He hadn’t quit politics, but was relatively inactive. Lincoln later recalled in his autobiographical statement for John Scripps that “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise aroused him as he had never been before.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Act had begun as an effort by Douglas to establish a government for the unorganized territory west of Iowa and Missouri, a parcel of the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase including what would eventually become the states of Kansas and Nebraska. The Missouri Compromise had banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36'30" parallel. The Kansas-Nebraska Act would efface the Missouri Compromise prohibition and let the people in the territory decide the status of slavery “under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.”
With a keen eye for the main chance, Douglas didn’t lack for reasons to push the act. He wanted a transcontinental railroad and wanted a route benefiting Illinois (and making his own real estate holdings more valuable). That was impossible so long as Southerners blocked legislation to organize the Kansas-Nebraska territory. They considered the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition on slavery in the Northern territories an affront. If Douglas could get them on board, it would have the additional benefit of enhancing his standing in the South and increasing his odds as a presidential candidate. Popular sovereignty would in theory cool national passions on the issue by making it a matter of democratic choice by voters in each locale. In any case, climate and soil would naturally check the spread of slavery into new territory in the north. For Douglas, it looked like a win-win several times over.
At first, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was left implicit in the act. Under pressure from Southerners, though, Douglas added language declaring it “inoperative and void.” He knew that the proposal, disturbing a long-standing dispensation at the behest of the South, would “raise a hell of a storm.” So it did. But Douglas was nothing if not a genius legislative mechanic. It was he, not the “Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, who had figured out how to get the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, settling what had been the prior major sectional flare-up over the country’s new territory. With the support of the administration of President Franklin Pierce, and a healthy helping of patronage to bring around reluctant Northern Democrats, Douglas cajoled, argued, and strategized his way to victory in the spring of 1854. “I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses,” he boasted.
Douglas reaped the whirlwind, and so did the country. The South’s prospective expansion into what had been considered territory locked away for freedom outraged and galvanized antislavery forces in the North. Douglas said burning effigies of him could light his way “from Boston to Chicago.” When he showed up in the latter city to defend the act, he got hooted at and lashed back, “Abolitionists of Chicago! It is now Sunday morning. I’ll go to church and you may go to Hell.” The law soon enough issued in a low-simmering civil war between pro- and antislavery forces fighting over the status of “bloody Kansas.” “I look upon that enactment not as a law,” Lincoln wrote of Kansas-Nebraska in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, “but as violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.”
The forces unleashed by Kansas-Nebraska buffeted both parties, but destroyed Lincoln’s Whigs. For a time it seemed that the nativist Know-Nothing party would emerge ascendant. It, too, was torn apart by sectional conflict, though, and a significant drop in immigration sapped some of its energy. After a period of partisan chaos, with every state embarking on its own path, the anti-Nebraska forces coalesced into the new Republican Party. Lincoln wrote in that same letter to Speed, “You enquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a whig; but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.”
He made a gradual transition into the new Republican Party that channeled the natural anti-aristocratic feelings of the public into its attacks on the slave South, or “the Slave Power,” capitalized. It enjoyed the protection of a South that overawed American government for much of its early existence. Slaveholders won most of the country’s first sixteen presidential elections. Through 1861, twenty-three of the thirty-six speakers of the House had been Southerners. Supreme Court justices had been disproportionately from the South. The federal government had a distinctively Southern flavor that benefited the region intensely protective of its peculiar institution.
From the first, slavery was overwhelmingly, although not entirely, a Southern phenomenon. In 1790, New York had more slaves than any other city besides Charleston, South Carolina. Even then, though, fewer than 6 percent of all slaves were in the North. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, slave labor tended to be concentrated in tobacco, rice, and indigo, grown in the Chesapeake area and the Carolinas and Georgia. The revolution in cotton production with the advent of Eli Whitney’s gin greased its spread throughout the westward-expanding south.
By 1850, about two-thirds of slaves worked on cotton plantations. Altogether, about a fourth of Southern whites owned slaves as of 1860. They ranged from owners of five to six slaves who worked alongside their chattel, to a better-off group of about a quarter of all slaveholders who owned up to fifty slaves, to the top three thousand families, who alone owned about a tenth of all the slaves.
Slavery was quite simply the cornerstone of the South, to borrow the phrase of the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. In 1860, the South’s nearly 4 million slaves were collectively worth about $3 billion, or more than all the nation’s banks, railroads, and factories put together, according to historian Eric Foner. As the rest of the world experienced a wave of emancipations, the South stood with the likes of Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico on the ramparts of slavery. Even Russia was emancipating the serfs.
The South craved more territory. It wanted to spread slavery and to forge new slave states to maintain the balance between North and South in the Senate. It eagerly supported the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the ensuing war with Mexico. The most aggressive Southerners coveted additional ground even farther south, in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. This push fed the tragicomic Southern tradition of filibustering, whereby a rogue’s gallery of Southern politicians and adventurers sought to take Latin American territory through their private exertions for the glory of Southern empire.
For his part, Lincoln had always opposed slavery, but with cat’s feet, cautiously, moderately. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” Lincoln averred in April 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.”
He didn’t have much direct experience of it. Lincoln remembered “a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis” with Joshua Speed in 1841. About a dozen slaves were on board, “shackled together with irons.” He told Speed in a letter years later that the “sight was a continual torment to me.” Such a spectacle, repeated whenever he touched a slave state, “has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.”
His family had lived on the borderlands of slavery. His native Kentucky was a slave state, although a somewhat attenuated one. Still, out of 7,500 people in Hardin County, where Lincoln spent his earliest years, more than 1,000 were slaves. At one point, Lincoln’s father worked on a milldam alongside slaves. His parents belonged to South Fork Baptist Church. When the church split over the issue of slavery, they joined the antislavery faction at Little Mount Baptist Church. Lincoln told Scripps that his father took the family across the Ohio River and into Indiana “partly on account of slavery.”
“Slave States,” Lincoln would say much later, perhaps speaking from experience, “are places for poor white people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition.”
He wasn’t often called on to legislate on the matter. In 1837, he was one of just six votes opposing resolutions in the Illinois legislature that excoriated abolitionism and declared that “the right of property in slaves is sacred.” Lincoln could manage to get only one other legislator, who wasn’t running for reelection, to sign onto a statement of dissent. It argued “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” although it included the caveat that “the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.”
As a congressman, he offered a plan for Washington, D.C., of gradual, compensated emancipation—always his preference—if approved by the District’s voters; it didn’t go anywhere. He opposed the Mexican War, offering his “spot” resolutions demanding to know the precise location of the alleged Mexican invasion of American soil that justified the war. This opened him to attack back home where the war was popular, as “Spotty Lincoln” or “Ranchero Spotty,” with his “pathetic lamentation over the fate of those Mexicans.” When Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania offered an amendment, the famous Wilmot Proviso, excluding slavery from land acquired from Mexico, Lincoln voted for it “as good as forty times,” he later claimed.
Even after Kansas-Nebraska, he never swung into the camp of the abolitionists. He favored the nonextension of slavery as a means toward its eventual extinction, with the endgame never exactly clear. He didn’t believe that natural conditions would stop its spread, as Douglas maintained. He pointed out that Illinois and Missouri were side by side, separated only by the Mississippi. Yet only Illinois was a free state, its status secured by a federal prohibition from the beginning. Nonextension had the political advantage of sidestepping or playing into anti-black sentiment—keeping slavery out of the West was indistinguishable from keeping out blacks. Taking this tendency a step further, Lincoln remained an advocate of the voluntary colonization of blacks years into the Civil War.
Kansas-Nebraska radicalized him, nonetheless. He staked his reputation and tethered his ambition to the cause of antislavery. In a fragment he wrote for himself in July 1858, he opened by noting, “I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station.” Then he mused on all the opponents of abolishing the slave trade in Great Britain and how long they had succeeded in preserving the trade. “Though they blazed,” he wrote, “like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell. School-boys know that Wilbeforce [sic], and Granville Sharpe [sic], helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?”
As the contest over slavery became the focus of his public advocacy, Lincoln’s rhetoric took on the majesty with which we now associate it. Beginning in August 1854, he made the case publicly against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, several times directly in reply to Douglas. We have the record of his speech in Peoria in October 1854. The Whig paper in Springfield, the Illinois State Journal, took seven issues to print the speech’s nearly seventeen thousand words, carefully edited by Lincoln himself. As Lewis Lehrman points out, the speech is the urtext of Lincoln’s advocacy for the next decade, with nearly everything else an elaboration.
Prior to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln referred to the Declaration only twice in public. Thereafter, it became a staple of his rhetoric and worldview, “his political chart and inspiration” in the words of his secretary John G. Nicolay. The Declaration had become a field of battle in the fight over slavery. Opponents of slavery brandished the glorious sentence from its preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Chicago abolitionist newspaper the Western Citizen published the preamble on the front of every edition.
Lincoln may have first read the Declaration in the law book The Statutes of Indiana. Betraying his logical cast of mind, Lincoln referred to it as containing “the definitions and axioms of free society.” For the South, it was a pernicious invitation to error. John C. Calhoun in 1848 called the idea that “all men are born free and equal” nothing less than “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Southern extremist George Fitzhugh agreed. “Liberty and equality are new things under the sun,” he wrote disapprovingly. Indiana senator John Pettit called the central contention of the Declaration “a self-evident lie”—a line that became a constant target for Lincoln.
In his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, Lincoln already remarked on “an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white-man’s charter of freedom—the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’ So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun.” From there, Lincoln jabbed, “it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the Governors of South Carolina. We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina.”
Lincoln cited a Virginia clergyman who had noted dismissively that the Declaration’s statement of universal equality is not found in the Bible but comes “from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson.” The man of the cloth went on to argue that he had never seen two men who were actually equal, although he admitted—he must have styled himself a wit—that “he never saw the Siamese twins.” Lincoln observed archly, “This sounds strangely in republican America,” and insisted that “the like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic.”
Distant from his own father, Lincoln felt a deep patriotic filial piety to “the fathers.” In the Lyceum address, he declared: “Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father.” It is our duty to transmit “undecayed” our inheritance of constitutional liberty, out of “gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.” At Peoria, he said, “I love the sentiments of those old time men.” In a stirring Chicago speech in 1858, he spoke of the “iron men” of the past, of “those old men,” and “that old Declaration of Independence.”
A sense of loss suffuses his statements in the 1850s. At Peoria, he lamented that “Little by little, but steadily as a man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith.” He imagined what would have happened had Senator Pettit denigrated the Declaration during the Founding generation: “If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man and thrust him into the street.”
Lincoln sought to recapture what seemed to be slipping away, to catch the falling flag of our patriotic patrimony. “He endeavored to bring back things to the old land marks,” Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon, “but he never would have attempted to invent and compose new systems. He had boldness enough when he found the building racked and going to decay to restore it to its original design but not to contrive a new & distinct edifice.” Lincoln wanted to “re-adopt,” as he said at Peoria, the Declaration. The road to salvation ran through 1776, he argued in a gorgeous passage: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”
Lincoln believed that this renewal is exactly the purpose for which the Declaration had been intended. He had complicated feelings about Thomas Jefferson even though he categorized him as one of “those noble fathers—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.” Henry Clay argued that his was the party that truly continued in the tradition of Jefferson, and so did Lincoln. But Lincoln had no use for Jefferson the aristocrat, the hypocritical slaveholder and celebrant—like Andrew Jackson—of yeoman agriculture. It was Jefferson’s Declaration that he adored.
Lincoln practically gushed in a 1859 letter to a Republican festival in Boston marking the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth: “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
For Lincoln, the Declaration laid the philosophical foundation for the liberal capitalism he wanted to spread and vindicate. It made the case for human dignity and created the predicate for a system that endlessly developed human potential. It undergirded what Republicans extolled as “free-labor civilization.”
Lincoln saw a biblical warrant for the natural rights the Declaration enunciated. As far back as roughly 1847, he wrote in notes for himself about tariff policy, “In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’ ” It follows that all good things come from labor and “such things belong to those whose labour has produced them.” Except that “it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.”
In those notes, Lincoln ruminated on what he considered the wasted cost of transportation of bringing goods here from overseas. In the much more consequential debate over slavery, he returned again and again to the biblical injunction to live from your own sweat. He denounced “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” In contrast, Lincoln defended the principle that “each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor.” Or in more down-to-earth terms, “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn.”
The truth of this proposition was obvious enough to be itself self-evident. In a fragment written for himself probably in the late 1850s, Lincoln said it had been “made so plain by our good Father in Heaven, that all feel and understand it, even down to brutes and creeping insects. The ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged. So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way.”
This view accorded with the thought of the philosophical inspirer of the Declaration, John Locke. The late-seventeenth-century English philosopher posited an inalienable right to life and liberty that extended to a right to property. Most fundamentally, we all have an equal and natural right to the inalienable possession of ourselves. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” Locke wrote, “they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” We extend ourselves to the outside world through work, and therefore acquire the right to property in particular things: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
It is this short chain of reasoning, legal scholar Bradford William Short argues, that binds the natural-rights philosophy of the Declaration to the economic premises of Lincoln and his allies: “Free labor ideology is the theory of the inalienable right to life and liberty,” Short writes. “It is more than that too, of course, but it necessarily always includes the theory at least at its core, as one of its first premises.”
Lincoln and his allies believed they had seen this view of the world play out in the North, “a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man,” as Eric Foner puts it.
The South begged to differ.
Historian John McCardell traces the development of proslavery thought from an emphasis on a biblical, paternalistic foundation to a frankly racist argument, as the leadership of the South shifted from the old seaboard to the rapidly growing interior. In 1845, South Carolina governor James Hammond wrote letters defending slavery to a British abolitionist. Referring to the Bible and history, he maintained that slavery was “a moral and humane institution, productive of the greatest political and social advantages,” including free people who were “higher toned and more deeply interested in preserving a stable and well ordered Government.” The argument had a distinctly antidemocratic key. Hammond boasted that in the South, “intelligence and wealth” didn’t give way to the “reckless and unenlightened numbers.”
Soon there arose a more “scientific” defense of slavery. Alabama doctor Josiah Nott championed a version of it that he charmingly deemed “niggerology.” He dispensed with the Bible to argue that blacks and whites were two different species, and published a collection of ethnological writing called Types of Mankind. In an essay directed to “The Non-Slaveholders of the South,” influential journalist James De Bow underlined the implications: the white man “can look down at those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.” Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey said the South elevated the white man “amongst the master race and put the negro race to do this dirty work which God designed they should do.”
The South boasted of the benefits of its system of racial hierarchy. In Slavery Justified, George Fitzhugh boasted how in the South “all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor.”
In their indictment of Northern capitalism, the Southern ideologists focused on the rise of wage labor, or “wage slavery,” as they deemed it. It had begun to supplant independent proprietorship as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Foner, by 1850 there were more wage earners than slaves, and by 1860, possibly more wage earners than self-employed workers. Fitzhugh insisted that wage earners, rather than experiencing the beneficence of one master, were “slaves of the community.” He located the source of the North’s inhumanity in the remorseless ethic of “every man for himself,” the “whole moral code of Free Society.”
The attack on wage labor relied on a zero-sum, class-conflict analysis of the economy. The labor movement maintained this view even after the Civil War, and Jacksonians in the North could be just as fierce in their denunciations. The New England intellectual Orestes Brownson, a Democrat, denounced wages as a mere salve for those “tender consciences who would retain all the advantages of the slave system without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders.”
No matter what the North told itself, according to this critique, the workers at the bottom of society couldn’t possibly escape their lot, any more than could field hands toiling in the cotton fields. They were doomed forever to remain the victims of Northern capitalism’s soulless individualism. South Carolina’s James Hammond deemed these workers the “mud sills,” part of the class in any society fated “to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgeries of life.” Only hypocrisy and self-delusion keep the North from admitting, he thundered, that “[y]our whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves.”
Lincoln had no patience for arguments in favor of a benevolent hierarchy made by the people who happened to live comfortably atop that hierarchy. Circa 1858, he wrote a spirited fragment for himself punctuated like a schoolgirl’s text message. He lampooned apologists for the South: “But, slavery is good for some people!!! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself. Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”
He took particular aim at one Frederick A. Ross, an Alabama minister and author of Slavery Ordained by God. In deciding whether or not a hypothetical slave (called Sambo by Lincoln) should be free or not, Dr. Ross doesn’t think to consult his slave. “While he consider[s] it,” Lincoln writes, “he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun.” Perhaps, Lincoln concludes, Ross might not be “actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.”
Lincoln’s critique of the Slave South is inseparable from his view of the free economy as the field for self-improvement. He wrote in a note for a speech in the late 1850s: “Advancement—improvement of condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.” In his 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, he evoked the America of upward mobility as “the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” The South’s ideal worker, in contrast, was “a blind horse upon a tread-mill.”
Defenders of free labor fiercely resisted the “mud sill” view of society and the imputation that the North reduced its workers to “wage slaves.” They believed in an essential identification between labor and capital. And however dire conditions might be in the industrializing cities of the North (overcrowded and unsanitary), they knew that the free laborer (obviously) had much more opportunity to exercise his autonomy and to better his condition than his alleged counterpart in bondage in the South.
“I have noticed in Southern newspapers,” Lincoln said in Kalamazoo in 1856, “the Southern view of the Free States.” He noted how they “insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern laborers! They think that men are always to remain laborers here—but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.”
This is a highly schematic portrayal, but it captures the essence of the matter. Free workers did tend to get better jobs over time, and to become better off than their fathers. If they felt stymied, they could always pick up and move elsewhere.
As for the South, the free-soil image of it was of a sink of backwardness wrought by slavery. Its romantic image of itself was of a bastion of high-minded paternalism above the money-grubbing of the degraded North. Neither was quite right, as the economic historian Robert Fogel demonstrates. Whatever justifications were thrown on the top of the slave system, it was basically a business proposition, a racket. What made it distinctive was the coercion and theft of labor, not separation from the market or absence of the profit motive.
Feeding overseas demand for cotton, plantations fully partook of the international economy, more so than any other sector of the nation’s economy. They were, in the context of the time, enormous economic enterprises whose owners were enormously wealthy, and in fact made up the lion’s share of the richest people in the country. The point of the gang labor of the cotton plantations was to regiment and maximize the efficiency of slave workers. Planters were very sensitive to the change in prices for crops, and so adjusted what they grew accordingly.
The system worked—up to a point. If the South were a country in 1860, according to Fogel, it would have been the fourth richest in the world. Per capita income grew at an impressive clip, and from 1840 to 1860, faster than that of the North. Driven by their slave gangs, the large plantations were more productive than free and slave small farms.
Nonetheless, the South was a society dominated by a planter elite upholding a twisted aristocratic ideal, largely dependent on one crop and on human bondage to produce it, unable to keep pace with a North leaping into modernity.
The population in the South was too dispersed to support Northern-style urbanization and industrialization, and the planters had no interest in either. Commercial conventions met constantly in the 1840s and 1850s to promote the idea of a more diversified economy to compete with that of the North. The likes of James De Bow called for action, as he put it, “in the busy hum of mechanism, and in the thrifty operations of the hammer and anvil.” To no avail. The entire system leaned the other way. Planters wanted to protect their power from any competitors or disruptive forces; cotton was so productive that there was little incentive to invest in anything else; and slavery made labor-saving technology less important.
The Southern transportation network, compared to that of the North, was rudimentary. The planters just had to export their crop and so long as there was enough of a network to get it to market and exported, that was enough. Southern states built railroads, but they usually didn’t reach beyond the state line. The only railway connecting Memphis to Charleston, east to west, was built with a multitude of different gauges.
The South couldn’t attract or hold on to people the way the North could. Fogel notes that the relatively new Southern states farther West—places like Mississippi and Arkansas—lost more native-born whites than they gained during the 1850s. And foreign immigrants overwhelmingly settled in the North, feeding factories with cheap labor. Education lagged. Planters didn’t have reason to invest in human capital outside the plantation system. According to economic historian Douglass North, with a little less than half of the white population of the North in 1850, the South had one-third as many public schools, one-fourth as many students, and one-twentieth as many libraries.
Above all, the South was committed to slavery. Slave-owning was the avenue to wealth and to prestige. A way of life was built upon it, and the region’s self-regard depended on it. The South considered the criticisms from the North ignorant and insulting. The South felt defensive, because it had so much to be defensive about. It had lashed itself to a system that was profoundly unjust and left it grossly underdeveloped compared to the North.
This was the backdrop to Lincoln’s combat with Douglas. The legendary affair between the two raged much more widely than the immortal seven debates. The two traveled a collective ten thousand miles. Lincoln gave sixty-three speeches, usually about two hours in length. Douglas gave 130, in a count that included shorter improvised remarks, and had almost lost his voice by the end. Lincoln wasn’t as well-known, of course. Papers outside of Illinois were liable to spell his name Abram. But Douglas knew what he was up against. “I shall have my hands full,” he predicted.
Lincoln’s friend Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon about what he considered the respective appeals of the candidates: “Douglass was idolized by his followers. Lincoln was loved by his. Douglass was the representative of his partisans. Lincoln was the representative man of the unsophisticated People. Douglass was great in the estimation of his followers. Lincoln was good in the opinion of his supporters. Douglass headed a party. Lincoln stood upon a principle.”
At the beginning of the campaign, Lincoln followed Douglas around and replied after his speeches in a strategy of calculated self-abasement. Lincoln considered it “the very thing” because it allowed him “to make a concluding speech on him.” Embarrassed that its candidate seemed an afterthought, the Republican state committee insisted that Lincoln request the joint debates. Lincoln’s initial proposal would have meant about 50; Douglas agreed to 7. They ranged up and down the state, with Lincoln’s most favorable territory in the northern part of the state (Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg), Douglas’s in the south (Jonesboro), and the most contested areas in the middle (Charleston, Quincy, Alton).
At the time of the debates, Senator Douglas looked every bit a man of his station. He dressed, Michael Burlingame writes, “in the so-called plantation style, with a ruffled shirt, dark blue coat with shiny buttons, light-colored trousers, well-polished shoes, and a wide brimmed hat.” Lincoln looked as disheveled as ever, dressed in a black alpaca outfit and ill-fitting stovepipe hat and toting an old carpetbag. Illinois lawyer Jonathan Birch recalled to Jesse Weik (Herndon’s fellow researcher) that he “carried with him a faded cotton umbrella which became almost as famous in the canvass as Lincoln himself.”
Douglas crisscrossed Illinois in style, in the “palace car” of the directors of the Illinois Central Railroad. His traveling companions included his second wife, Adele, who was twenty-two years old and a grand-niece of Dolley Madison (Douglas had lost his first wife a few years earlier, in 1853); a sculptor working on his bust; and a collection of stenographers and loyal editors. He smoked cigars at his whistle-stops, and as the campaign progressed, drank more and more. In one version of his lecture on discoveries and inventions, Lincoln went out of his way to slyly tweak Douglas, a champion of an expansionistic movement calling itself “Young America.” “If there be anything old which he can endure,” Lincoln said of the characteristic Young American, “it is only old whiskey and old tobacco.”
Festooned with a banner declaring S.A. DOUGLAS, THE CHAMPION OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, the Douglas train came outfitted with a cannon dubbed “Popular Sovereignty,” or “Little Doug.” It boomed the arrival of the exalted statesman. Lincoln commented sardonically of the cannon, “There is a passage, I think, in the Book of Koran, which reads: ‘To him that bloweth not his own horn—to such a man it is forever decreed that . . . his horn shall not be blowe-ed!’ ”
Lincoln flew coach. He traveled in ordinary passenger cars on trains with, the Chicago Press & Tribune observed, “no cannon and powder monkeys before him.” Once he rode on the caboose of a freight train that had to make way for the flag-bedecked Douglas conveyance. “Boys,” Lincoln remarked, “the gentleman in that car evidently smelt no royalty in our carriage.” Compared to Douglas, he was practically a hobo. The Illinois lawyer Birch described to Jesse Weik seeing Lincoln board a train during the campaign in his usual outfit, including “the inevitable umbrella.” According to Birch, “On his arm was the cloak that he was said to have worn when he was in Congress nine years before.” Lincoln chatted with acquaintances until nighttime. Then he found a seat by himself. “Presently he arose,” Birch said, “spread the cloak over the seat, lay down, somehow folded himself up till his long legs and arms were no longer in view, then drew the cloak about him and went to sleep. Beyond what I have mentioned he had no baggage, no secretary, no companion even.”
The two were impressive debaters in their own way. Lincoln was blessed with a verbal acuity that Douglas, whom Don Fehrenbacher calls “among the least quoted of major American statesmen,” couldn’t match. But Douglas was magnetic and lively. He had none of Lincoln’s lawyerly respect for the facts and careful argumentation. Lincoln complained of his “audacity in maintaining an untenable position.” Their styles, as Allen Guelzo points out, reflected the different sensibilities of their parties—Douglas blustery and passionate, Lincoln logical and precise.
The events made for rollicking, open pageants of democracy. They drew thousands, straining to hear the two men declaiming from the same platforms, with people jockeying for position near the candidates and some clambering up with them. Douglas’s voice was booming, Lincoln’s high-pitched—making it easy to hear. The partisans of the rivals faced off with competing parades, brass bands, banners, hecklers, and salutes by cannon. “The prairies,” wrote a New York journalist, “are on fire.”
After the first debate at Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln’s supporters carried him off on their shoulders as a band played, “Hail, Columbia!” At the next debate, in Freeport, a small boy got up on the platform and sat on Douglas’s lap, then on Lincoln’s. Someone in the crowd at that encounter threw a piece of melon that hit Douglas when he got up to speak—perhaps less of an indignity than one visited upon him at a campaign stop in Danville, where his carriage was befouled with what was delicately referred to as “loathsome dirt.”
At the town of Charleston, Illinois, the Douglas demonstration was graced by thirty-two young women on horseback. Each lady represented a state of the union. Half carried sticks of ash in homage to Henry Clay (his estate was Ashland); half sticks of hickory in honor of Andrew Jackson (“Old Hickory”). Lincoln countered with a wagon full of thirty-two lasses of his own. The candidates’ supporters tussled over whether a pro-Lincoln or pro-Douglas banner would grace the platform. That of the Lincoln partisans declared, LINCOLN WORRYING DOUGLAS AT FREEPORT, illustrated by a depiction of Lincoln as a dog going for Douglas’s throat. Douglas supporters hauled up a derisive banner depicting a white man and black woman, NEGRO EQUALITY. (To mark one Lincoln campaign stop in Rushville, Douglas supporters simply hoisted a black flag on top of the courthouse.)
Douglas sought to portray Lincoln as an extremist. Lincoln wanted to blunt the charge, but also—somewhat at cross-purposes with this goal—get the debate on the higher plane of the House Divided speech to condemn Douglas for his moral indifference to slavery.
Douglas certainly wasn’t where the South was. In fact, he had thrilled and impressed Republicans by breaking with the administration of his fellow Democrat James Buchanan over its embrace of the fraudulent proslavery Lecompton Constitution in Kansas. He was by no means a rabid supporter of slavery. But he held a dim view of the humanity of blacks and wanted to get on with what he considered the more important matter of settling the rest of the continent and perhaps taking territory farther south.
He had a ferocious opening debate in Ottawa, but Lincoln picked up in the final clashes as he reached for the moral high ground and Douglas began to get worn down. Amid much that was petty, repetitive, and forgettable, the basic argument went like this:
Douglas rejected Lincoln’s House Divided speech as a call for sectional conflict and for national uniformity. At Ottawa, he said the House Divided doctrine was “revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this Government.” The Founders knew, Douglas argued, “when they framed the Constitution that in a country as wide and broad as this, with such a variety of climate, production and interest, the people necessarily required different laws and institutions in different localities.” That included slavery.
Douglas didn’t feel the slightest bit defensive about the Founders. “Washington and his compeers in the convention that framed the constitution,” he said at Jonesboro, “made this government divided into free and slave State.” The Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with it.
He sneered at Lincoln’s use of the Declaration. At Galesburg, he called Lincoln’s belief “that the negro and the white man are made equal by the Declaration of Independence and by Divine Providence” nothing less than “a monstrous heresy.” How could Jefferson possibly have meant to say that “his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?”
The Founders didn’t literally mean all men were created equal. “They desired to express by that phrase,” Douglas said at Jonesboro, “white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men.” No, as Douglas said at Charleston and elsewhere, “I say that this government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men.”
Douglas thought it a travesty that the country’s march across the continent and perhaps farther south should be checked by agitation over slavery. Douglas said at Freeport, “I answer that whenever it becomes necessary, in our growth and progress to acquire more territory, that I am in favor of it, without reference to the question of slavery.” This process of acquisition might take us far afield. “The time may come, indeed has now come,” Douglas explained at Jonesboro, “when our interests would be advanced by the acquisition of the island of Cuba. When we get Cuba we must take it as we find it, leaving the people to decide the question of slavery for themselves, without interference on the part of the federal government, or of any State of this Union.” So, too, with “any portion of Mexico or Canada, or of this continent or the adjoining islands.”
Lincoln countered that, like it or not, we were indeed a House Divided. The difference between slavery and freedom wasn’t a matter of a pleasing diversity among the states. “I shall very readily agree with him that it would be foolish for us to insist upon having a cranberry law here, in Illinois, where we have no cranberries, because they have a cranberry law in Indiana, where they have cranberries,” Lincoln said in Alton. “I should insist that it would be exceedingly wrong in us to deny to Virginia the right to enact oyster laws where they have oyster, because we want no such laws here.” But slavery was, obviously, a more consequential matter: “When have we had any difficulty or quarrel amongst ourselves about the cranberry laws of Indiana, or the oyster laws of Virginia, or the pine lumber laws of Maine, or the fact that Louisiana produces sugar, and Illinois flour?”
Lincoln charged that Douglas wanted the peace of surrender on slavery. “To be sure if we will all stop and allow Judge Douglas and his friends to march on in their present career until they plant the institution all over the nation, here and wherever else our flag waves, and we acquiesce in it, there will be peace. But let me ask Judge Douglas how he is going to get the people to do that?” The senator’s position, Lincoln argued at Alton, was “that we are to care nothing about it! I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that every body does care the most about?”
He objected to Douglas’s contention that the Founders “made” the country half-slave and half-free. “The exact truth,” he said of slavery at Alton, “is that they found the institution existing among us, and they left it as they found it. But in making the government they left this institution with many clear marks of disapprobation upon it.”
As for Jefferson, Lincoln said at Galesburg, “that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just’; and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.”
Lincoln returned repeatedly to arguments about the Founders that were staples of his throughout the 1850s. They had set a date, 1808, for when the slave trade could be prohibited, and promptly prohibited it as soon as the day arrived. They excluded it from the Northwest territory—the chunk of territory that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (in part)—in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. “Why stop its spread in one direction,” he asked at Alton, “and cut off its source in another, if they did not look to its being placed in the course of ultimate extinction?”
Lincoln gave the Founders a favorable gloss. The federal government was happy to see slavery expand into the Gulf states in the first part of the nineteenth century. Eric Foner points out that between the ratification of the Constitution and 1854, nine slave states entered the union and the slave population grew from 700,000 to more than 3 million. But Lincoln was right that we had regressed since the Founding. In percentage terms, there were fewer free blacks in the South in 1860 than half a century earlier, both because free blacks left and the South had made it even harder for blacks to earn their freedom. From 1830 on, the South tightened its legal grip, seeking to deny any light of hope from shining through cracks in the system. States made it illegal even for masters to teach slaves to read. In a wave of restriction in the late 1850s, Louisiana generously passed a law called “An Act to Permit Free Persons of African Descent to Select a Master and Become Slaves for Life.” Arkansas gave free blacks the choice of leaving or getting enslaved.
Lincoln wanted the mark of disapprobation back on slavery. This was the crux of the matter: the morality of human bondage. “When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them,” Lincoln explained at Quincy, “he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Douglas met the question with an evasion. “He has the high distinction,” Lincoln said, “so far as I know, of never having said slavery is either right or wrong. Almost everybody else says one or the other, but the Judge never does.”
Lincoln obviously didn’t have this problem. In the debates, he called slavery “a moral, social and political wrong.” It follows that, he continued in Quincy, “We deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there may be some promise of an end to it.”
He argued that the Douglas view opened the way for two potential developments favorable to the entrenchment and spread of slavery. The first was further Southern expansionism, which Douglas himself cited as a benefit of his approach. “If Judge Douglas’ policy upon this question succeeds,” Lincoln said at Galesburg, “and gets fairly settled down, until all opposition is crushed out, the next thing will be a grab for the territory of poor Mexico, an invasion of the rich lands of South America, then the adjoining islands will follow, each one of which promises additional slave fields.” The second, another Dred Scott decision, built upon the country’s moral indifference to slavery.
The first decision had been bad enough. The Supreme Court held in 1857 that blacks couldn’t be citizens and there was no power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in the territories. The Court did Douglas one better, and ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. In his decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney spoke of the Negro as an “ordinary article of merchandise and traffic,” “so far inferior that [he] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens said of that line that it “damned [Taney] to everlasting fame; and, I fear, to everlasting fire.”
Among other things, Dred Scott made a mockery of popular sovereignty. Douglas had constructed his entire edifice upon people freely choosing whether or not to open their territories to slavery. Then the Supreme Court said it couldn’t be done. Lincoln pressed Douglas on this point with his famous questions at Freeport, which Douglas answered with his Freeport Doctrine—as a practical matter, slavery could be excluded by “unfriendly legislation,” no matter what the high court said. Lincoln ridiculed the idea that local laws could override the Supreme Court. And he feared the next easy step to the nationalization of slavery: “It is merely,” he said at Ottawa, “for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature can do it.”
Throughout the debates, Douglas spoke of blacks in the same key as Taney. One of his most reliable arguments was the low-down, unembarrassed pander to negrophobia, in his struggle with what he constantly referred to as the Black Republicans.
At the first debate in Ottawa, he put it to listeners this way: “Do you desire to turn this beautiful State into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become citizens and voters, on an equality with yourselves?” In the final debate at Alton, he made this ringing affirmation: “I would not blot out the great inalienable rights of the white men for all the negroes that ever existed.”
In Freeport, he scraped bottom when he referred to the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as one of Lincoln’s advisers. He told the story of how the last time he had been in town, “I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglass and her mother reclined inside.” He generously allowed how “if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” George Wallace called this putting the hay down low where the goats can get it. This riff was met with a cry of “Down with the negro.”
For his part Lincoln drew a distinction between natural rights, which he believed extended to everyone, and political and social rights, which he thought should be circumscribed depending on circumstance. In the first debate in Ottawa, he quoted from his speech at Peoria when he had considered the possibility of freeing blacks and making them “politically and socially, our equals.” He had said, “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
In Charleston, located in the middle of the state and heavily populated by conservative Whigs, Lincoln opened his presentation with a disclaimer: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” He added “that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
“I do not understand,” he added, “that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes.”
To our ears all this sounds damnable, but context matters. Lincoln never had the luxury of addressing a Vassar College faculty meeting. All of the states where Lincoln had resided—Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—at one point banned blacks. Any black person coming into Illinois had to post a one-thousand-dollar bond. A referendum in 1848 to allow the state legislature to prohibit free blacks from entering the state got 70 percent of the vote.
Lincoln’s opposition to the full panoply of rights for blacks is less remarkable than his forthright defenses of their humanity. In Chicago in 1858, at the beginning of the campaign, he gave Douglas yet more fodder when he said, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position. . . . Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln himself so “quibbled” during the debates, but only under constant racist attack and only under the pressure of a close-fought election where winning over anti-black voters was imperative. It is Lincoln’s high points that are most extraordinary. And it was to them that he would prove true in the coming years of great testing.
In the final debate at Alton, Lincoln cast the choice over slavery as another battle in “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
That tyrannical principle strikes at the core of who we are not just as a people, but as people. At Alton, Lincoln said of the racially exclusive view of the Declaration: “I combat it as having a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.” Appealing to the self interest of his listeners (again, in language jarring to modern sensibilities), Lincoln evoked an American West free of slavery, as a wide-open platform for aspiration: “Now irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home—may find some spot where they can better their condition—where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life.” He wanted the West as “an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over—in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life.”
Whatever the allure of this vision, it didn’t get Lincoln over the top against Douglas, of course. More people voted in Illinois in 1858 than in the presidential election of 1856. Republicans won the popular vote yet the apportionment of legislative districts favored Democrats and allowed Douglas to prevail anyway. Democrats held the south, the Republicans the north, and Lincoln lost the race in the Whig belt in the middle of the state. Henry Whitney recalled in a letter to William Herndon that Lincoln thought he could only count on the loyalty of his law partner: “He said to me on the day Douglas was elected to the U.S. Senate—& bitterly too—‘I expect everyone to desert me except Billy.’ ”
Instead, he ascended to glory. In time, he won the larger argument—at a cost in blood and treasure that would have seemed unimaginable to him standing on those debate platforms with Douglas. After his election to the presidency, on his long trip to Washington in early 1861, making stops and speeches along the way, he addressed the New Jersey Senate. He remembered how “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weem’s Life of Washington.’ ” He said the events surrounding the battle at Trenton transfixed him and stayed with him still: “You all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” That something, he continued, “held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”
He stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to lead a raising of the new flag bearing thirty-four stars, after Kansas had just joined the union and Oregon in 1859. In an impromptu talk, he invoked the deeper promise of the founding generation “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” With threats to his personal safety in mind, he continued, “But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
He wouldn’t be assassinated. Not yet. Not on that spot. Not before he waged and won a war that defeated the Southern system and opened the way for the ascendance of the vision that had motivated him from his very first stirrings as a politician.