1858 (21 page)

Lincoln dismissed Douglas’s enormous crowds, well-attended parades, and frenzied, well-received speeches. He wrote a friend, “It is all as bombastic and hollow as Napoleon’s bulletins sent back from his campaign in Russia.”
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Douglas was vulnerable.

Lincoln believed that events had given him an opportunity to defeat Douglas. At the same time that Douglas and the Democrats seemed to weaken, Lincoln and the Republicans were gaining strength. The new party was just as strong as the Democrats by 1858 and on the verge, its national leaders believed, of taking control of both the House and Senate. Locally, Republican Lyman Trumbull had won election to the U.S. Senate in 1855

and Republican Richard Bissell had been elected governor. The Republicans now controlled nearly 45 percent of the state legislature. The Republicans had much momentum. Lincoln, who had spent one uneventful term as a congressman, had roared back into politics with the Republicans, who had given him new life as one of their party leaders. He had always been a fine public speaker, but now he was even better, impressing people and drawing large and enthusiastic audiences wherever he went. He scribbled in a notebook that “speeches at once attracted a more marked attention than they had ever before done.”
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He had mastered the art of polling as a Whig, and now as a Republican he used polls to enable him to campaign shrewdly, concentrating on the districts he needed to win and ignoring the areas in which he was either far ahead or far behind. Lincoln talked to just about anyone he encountered—neighbors, courthouse personnel, strangers he met at hotels when he traveled—about politics, always eager to know what the people were thinking. He and his associates had run colorful and successful campaigns. One reporter wrote of the work of the new party in Illinois, “The drive and energy of the Republicans astounded their opponents.”

Now, in 1858, he was serving as his own campaign manager, plotting strategy, raising money, booking speaking dates, working with newspaper editors, planning rallies, renting hotel rooms, mapping travel itineraries, and hiring campaign workers.
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Most of all, though, he lived in a turbulent decade and was running for the U.S. Senate in 1858, a chaotic year. The swirl of events and feverish climate might just bring him victory. He had almost won a Senate seat three years earlier. Lincoln was the front-runner in the legislative race for the post but, realizing he could not win, stepped aside in order to permit another antislavery candidate, Trumbull, to defeat a Douglas supporter. Now he had a second chance and he was not going to let it pass him by.
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He had once said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” and in his race against Stephen Douglas his belief would be severely tested.
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Lincoln did not fear Douglas, but shrewdly insisted in public, as he always had, that he was no match for his opponent. He had been doing so since 1848. Again and again, he had warned legislatures, newspapers, and crowds at rallies that he was always at a disadvantage in any disputes with the great Douglas. In 1854 he invited a Springfield crowd to return after supper to hear him refute Douglas, who spoke in the afternoon, reminding them that Douglas’s “high reputation and ability” gave him a distinct advantage over Lincoln. He joked to the crowd that they should “stay for the fun of hearing him skin me.”
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Privately, he knew that he was as good at speaking and debating as Douglas, and he eagerly looked forward to proving it. Lincoln had always been jealous of Douglas, for whom everything in life had seemed to come so easy. Douglas was one of the most famous people in the country and Lincoln was barely known outside of his home state. Lincoln wrote in 1856, “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
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And too, Lincoln lamented that Douglas had such a national presence that anything he said molded public opinion.
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There was some anger, too, that the famous Douglas paid little attention to Lincoln, his friend of twenty years. “He indulged himself in a contemptuous expression of pity for me,” Lincoln once wrote of a Douglas speech delivered back in 1839.
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Douglas was wary of Lincoln. His aides assured the Little Giant that following his years of besting the titans of American politics in Washington again and again he had no need to worry about the local Republican challenger. Douglas knew better. He told one man, “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of his party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd and if I beat him the victory will be hardly won.”
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Douglas knew what a moving speaker his friend Lincoln could be. He had sat in numerous audiences that burst into unrestrained cheering following Lincoln’s speeches. The Republican was not only full of humor and a great storyteller, but an emotional speaker who spoke directly to the hearts of those in the audience—and with great effect. One reporter who covered a speech that Lincoln delivered at the State Fair in Springfield in 1856 wrote, “For an hour he held the assemblage spellbound by the power of his argument, the intense eloquence. When he concluded, the audience sprang to their feet and cheer after cheer told how deeply their hearts had been touched, and their souls warmed up to a generous enthusiasm.”

Another reporter wrote that in his life he had never heard anyone like Lincoln. “All the strings that play upon the human heart and understanding were touched with masterly skill and force, while beyond and above all skill was the overwhelming conviction pressed upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspirational duty to his fellow man…”
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This praise for Lincoln as a speaker was not new. As early as 1839, the
Sangamon Journal
wrote of his oratorical prowess in a speech that was “characterized by that great force and point for which he is so justly admired.” A Boston reporter wrote in 1848, “He spoke in a clear and cool and very eloquent manner for an hour and a half, carrying the audience with him in his able arguments and brilliant illustrations.” Lincoln remembered those speeches now, in 1858; so did Douglas.
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While Douglas had been hailed in Illinois and Washington as the nation’s greatest debater, Lincoln had quietly become a vaunted debater himself. He began his career as an oral gladiator while still a boy, friends remembered, standing on top of boxes and tree stumps to talk to a group of children. As a young man in New Salem, he joined the New Salem Debating Society and studied books about debating, such as Kirkham’s
Grammar
and William Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution
. He studied the Bible for stories and memorized quotes from famous men. He filled his early talks and arguments with analogies and metaphors, created a universe of bears, dogs, bees, and birds that he substituted for political opponents. One American Party leader who switched to the Republicans because of Lincoln said he “was one of the most remarkable speakers of English living. In all that constitutes logical eloquence, straightforwardness, clearness of statement, sincerity that commands your admiration…strength of argument…he is infinitely superior to Douglas.”
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He developed a genuine wit, too, regaling crowds with his humorous stories. All of the reporters covering the campaign and debates noticed that. “A shrug of the shoulder, an elevation of his eyebrows, a depression of his mouth, and a general malformation of countenance so comically awkward that it never fails to bring down the house,” wrote one reporter. Another observed that when his wit surfaced, “his body straightened up, his countenance brightened, his language became free and animated.” And yet another told readers that “the tones, the gestures, the kindling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter’s skill.”
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No one appreciated Lincoln’s debating prowess more than Douglas. The men had tangled in politics, directly and indirectly, for more than twenty years. They first faced off in the Illinois state legislature over a slavery bill in 1836–1837. The pair met again as they campaigned for party candidates in the 1838 congressional elections. In 1839–1840, the two directly debated each other as local representatives for the party presidential candidates. The two opposed each other in several court cases in Illinois and even in a murder trial, with Douglas serving as county prosecutor, when Lincoln managed to win a surprise acquittal for a man who killed another in a hotel room. In various elections in the 1840s and 1850s, the two men campaigned for candidates throughout Illinois, speaking separately to the same crowds on the same day or on the next day. Each would often remain to listen to the other’s speech.

Lincoln was not physically attractive. His law partner, Billy Herndon, said of him, “He was not a pretty man by any means…he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain looking.” He seemed awkward with his extraordinarily long arms and legs, lanky frame, huge head, large ears, distinctive Adam’s apple, facial wrinkles, thick eyebrows, and always unkempt hair. Everything about him seemed the wrong size. One man remarked that “his body seemed a huge skeleton in clothes.”
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His face was clearly defined by sharp features, his eyes dark under heavy brows; his forehead high and his hair seemingly uncombable, leading one reporter to write that “[His] appearance is not comely.”
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His presidential secretary, John Nicolay, who knew him well, always insisted that photographers and artists never captured his real essence. He wrote that he had a face “that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade, sparkle of the eye and curve of the lip, in the long gamut of expression from grave to gay and back again, from the rollicking jollity of laughter to that serious, far away look.” And a journalist added that when telling stories his famous melancholy look disappeared. “The eyes began to sparkle, the mouth to smile, and the whole countenance was wreathed with animation.”
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All were struck by his gargantuan size, six feet four inches, and enormous physical strength. He had worked with his hands as a farmer and rail-splitter as a young man and retained his strength over the years; men swore they had seen him lift six hundred pounds. In one of the debates, he insisted that a Douglas supporter on the platform explain something and when the man refused Lincoln playfully grabbed his jacket collar with one of his huge hands and, rather easily, picked the man up and carried him several feet—to the laughter of the crowd.
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Lincoln made up his mind to force Douglas into a series of debates during the middle of the summer in order to win the race. The way to do that, he decided, was to attend Douglas’s speeches and then, when the Judge finished, invite the crowd to return after an hour or so to listen to him refute the Judge’s charges, or to return the next day. It was a very effective ploy because it not only gave him a chance to answer Douglas right away, but to add the sizable Douglas throngs to his own. Lincoln thought it was an almost perfect plan. He wrote later, “Speaking at the same place the next day after Douglas is the very thing—it is, in fact, a concluding speech on him.” To let Douglas know what he planned to do, Lincoln released a schedule of his speeches and locations so the Democrats could see that he was following their candidate, intent on stealing his audiences. It was a subtle way to get Douglas to debate him.
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