1858 (19 page)

If there were any doubts in his mind about his decision to forge on in the Illinois Senate race against Abraham Lincoln without White House support, they disappeared on July 9. On that day, Douglas returned to Chicago from Washington for the beginning of what would be the historic campaign against Lincoln. He boarded a special four-car train in Michigan City, Indiana, and proceeded slowly to Chicago, passing through dozens of communities where thousands of residents lined the train tracks to see his cars pass, cheering loudly for the Little Giant. His well-orchestrated arrival in Chicago might have rivaled that of Alexander the Great when his army entered Babylon. Douglas’s train was met with a thunderous cannon salute from 150 pieces of artillery.

He rode through the city streets in an open carriage pulled by six horses and waved to thousands of supporters who lined every avenue. Small Douglas banners hung from the windows of buildings and huge banners were strung over the wide thoroughfares of the bustling Midwestern metropolis. Douglas revelers crowded the rooftops of buildings, alleyways, porches, and windows and roared for the senator as loudly as they could as his carriage passed and a smiling Douglas waved to all, nodding his head in thanks.

The huge throngs followed the parade through early evening as it slowly made its way to the Tremont House where Douglas stayed, their numbers filling several city streets. He spoke to the crowd, estimated at close to thirty thousand, for a few moments; his combative, booming voice carrying over the multitude with their signs and banners. When he finished, a bit hoarse and very tired, rockets were fired up into the sky and a huge fireworks display began. The celebration ended with another burst of rockets soaring high into the night, framing a carefully lettered fireworks explosion of his theme, “Popular Sovereignty.” Below it, on the streets of Chicago, thousands cheered as bands played “Yankee Doodle.”

Could he defeat the Buchanan wing of the party
and
its candidates
and
Lincoln at the same time? As he waved back to the thirty thousand cheering supporters in the crowd gathered in front of the hotel and watched the rockets burst high over Lake Michigan, he had to ask himself, how could he not?
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Chapter Six

Abraham Lincoln wanted to remember his debates with Stephen Douglas in their race for the United States Senate seat from Illinois in the fall of 1858; so did the rest of the nation.
²⁵⁰

The race was the most closely watched contest of the year; it attracted national attention from numerous large eastern newspapers. The contest was widely covered for several reasons: 1. the Democratic candidate was incumbent Stephen Douglas, one of the most famous men in the country, who had to win the election to become the next president; 2. Douglas was being undermined by President Buchanan, the head of his own party; 3. the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, while unknown outside of Illinois, represented the fiery new Republican Party; 4. it was a showdown over the Kansas constitution and slavery in general; 5. Illinois had become the fourth most populous state in the country and was evenly divided into proslavery and antislavery regions with key central counties where feelings on the issue were mixed; and 6. it featured seven debates that gave those in the audiences, and national correspondents, a complete and vivid picture of the two candidates.

Both men were veteran politicians and skilled public speakers. Both had strong opinions about slavery. Both were also overly ambitious. Everyone knew that Douglas wanted to be president. Of Lincoln, a friend wrote that “his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”
²⁵¹

The campaign began in a firestorm on June 16, when Lincoln stunned the Republican convention, and all of Illinois, with his “house divided” speech, which he delivered when accepting the party’s nomination for the Senate. Lincoln told the convention that the United States could not go on with half of the country condoning slavery and the other half abhorring it. “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other,” he said, referring to the familiar biblical line.

The crowd jamming the convention leapt to its feet at the conclusion of the speech, the hall echoed with thunderous applause. Party leaders grimaced as they heard the riveting speech. They wanted Lincoln to maintain his moderate policy of accepting slavery where it existed and opposing it only in the territories. Now, in this unexpected radical turn, he had just about predicted a Civil War.
²⁵²

The major issue in the Illinois Senate race was slavery, as it was in every contest that autumn. The men disagreed sharply over it. Douglas believed that the United States was always going to have free and slave states and that the residents of new territories should be able to decide whether they wanted the institution. Lincoln grudgingly accepted slavery where it was already in place, but believed that the founding fathers wanted it to be abolished eventually. Universal emancipation could not occur if the residents of new territories could choose slavery. Lincoln argued that was evident in the language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which forbade slavery in the land above and west of the Ohio River that the United States also acquired from England—including his own Illinois.
²⁵³

Lincoln traced his hatred of slavery back to an early 1830s boat trip on which he saw several slaves chained to one another. He wrote, “That sight was a continual torment to me and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other slave border. It is…a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.”
²⁵⁴

In 1855, after he joined the Republican Party, he wrote a friend of slavery, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
²⁵⁵

Although he was willing to let slavery exist in the South, he had repeatedly denounced it throughout his life, always reminding his audiences that slaves were human beings, and not property, as slaveholders insisted. In Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, he turned the issue upside down and asked the crowd why hundreds of people, many from the South, had found “something” to liberate their slaves. “What is that something?” Lincoln said. “Is there any mistaking to it? In all these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually telling you that the poor Negro has some natural rights to himself—that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death. Why ask us to deny the humanity of the slave?”
²⁵⁶

He was always angry about slavery, telling one crowd that “as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black, foul lie can never be consecrated with God’s hallowed truth.” It was, to him, “a moral, social and political evil” that was wrong and had to be ended. Of those who put up with slavery, he said, “Do they really think the right ought to yield to the wrong? Are they afraid to stand by the right? Do they really think that by right surrendering to wrong, the hopes of our Constitution, our Union, and our liberties can possibly be bettered?” He scoffed at Southerners such as Jefferson Davis and Robert Rhett who argued that slavery was a good thing because Negroes could not care for themselves. “We never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it,
by being a slave himself
,” he said.
²⁵⁷

Lincoln never framed his opposition to slavery more eloquently than he did in 1854, when he attacked Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act, a bill that permitted residents of the territories to decide whether or not they wanted slavery within their borders. He said of slavery, “I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self interest.”
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