1858 (22 page)

Douglas followers, not realizing the ploy, were appalled at Lincoln. They accused him of trying to kidnap the senator’s crowd. Douglas joked to audiences, and to Lincoln himself, that he was welcome to follow him around the state because that is the only way he would attract large crowds. One Douglas supporter, a newspaper editor, noted that Lincoln had scheduled one speech in a circus tent. That was proper, he wrote, because Lincoln followed everyone and now he was following circus clowns, too.
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The press poked fun at Lincoln’s tactics. A reporter for the Lowell, Massachusetts,
Journal and Courier
wrote, “Douglas and Lincoln are stumping the state and a right merry time they are having of it; wherever the Little Giant happens to be, Abe is sure to turn up and be a thorn in his side.”
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Lincoln could accomplish several goals if he could talk Douglas into a series of debates: 1. standing on the same platform, he would give himself equal stature as Douglas and eradicate his status as an underdog running against a famous U.S. senator, 2. the debates would garner extensive press coverage in Illinois and, perhaps, the nation, giving Lincoln national visibility, and 3. they would give him the chance to attempt to force the easily irritated Douglas into statements he would regret.

Some Democrats warned Douglas not to debate Lincoln and to dismiss Republican charges that the Little Giant was afraid of an oratorical donnybrook with him. The editor of the
Illinois State Register
wrote that Douglas did not have to debate Lincoln at all, and that in so doing he would only help Lincoln’s campaign. “Mr. Lincoln’s political necessities may have needed this boosting of him into prominence…”
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Douglas had not only been goaded into the debates by Lincoln, but by the vitriolic Republican newspapers, too. A writer on the
State Journal
accused the Little Giant of “…sneaking about the country by himself, assailing, misrepresenting, and vilifying the man whom he has so ignominiously refused to meet in open, manly debate, before the whole people.” A writer for the
State Register
challenged his oratorical manhood by charging, “The idea of a man who has crossed blades in the Senate with the strongest intellects of the country…dreads encounter with Mr. A. Lincoln is an absurdity that can be uttered by his organs only with a ghastly phhiz.”
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Douglas knew that Lincoln would not quit shadowing him until he agreed to debate. He suggested debates in several towns and cities in Illinois and Lincoln agreed. The men would meet first at Ottawa on August 21, and then meet again at Freeport on August 27, Jonesboro on September 15, Charleston on September 18, Galesburg on October 7, Quincy on October 13, and Alton on October 15.
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Both men had developed a stand on the issues by the time the first debate took place in Ottawa. Lincoln was confident that everyone in the state knew his positions and that they were the opposite of Douglas’s. Their differences were, Douglas said, “direct, unequivocable, and irreconcilable.” A reporter for the
New York Evening Post
who had covered the race agreed, writing that “two men presenting wider contrasts could hardly be found.”
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What Lincoln needed to do, and believed he could do, was take advantage of Douglas’s bluster on many issues and his simplistic analogies, such as comparing the right of a people to have slavery in a territory to their right to have liquor stores.
²⁹⁸
And whenever pushed on his positions, Douglas would proudly reply that “I go for…the right of the people to decide for themselves.”

Douglas was always careful, making certain he appealed to those in favor of slavery, those opposed to it, and those opposed to it who wanted freedom for blacks, but not too much of it. “I am opposed to Negro equality,” he thundered throughout the campaign, reminding crowds how equality had ruined countries in Central and South America. He told listeners, “This government is founded on the white basis… It was made by the white man, for the white man, to be administered by white men.” Then, the traditional white vote in his grasp, he assured all that within that white government blacks could have rights assigned to them by their states and territories. Lincoln believed that he could trip him up on that stand.
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The two men had distinctly different assessments of the debates. Lincoln saw them as his best chance to defeat Douglas by showcasing his considerable oratorical and argumentative skills. He believed that the debates would not only show him as the equal of Douglas in Illinois, but also give him much-needed national visibility. Douglas’s view was different. To him, the debates were but a small part of the larger campaign and certainly would not be the deciding factor.
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Besides, Douglas believed that verbally he could out-duel anybody in the country. He had been doing so for years, impressing audiences with his deep, rich voice, animated descriptions, and uncanny ability to win over farmers in villages on the Illinois western frontier just as he could woo well-educated merchants in Chicago. On any speakers’ platform he appeared as a man of great intensity, constantly waving his arms, jabbing his fingers into the air, and heaving his short body back and forth for effect. Even Lincoln’s friends conceded that the Judge was the nation’s top debater. Lincoln’s law partner Billy Herndon wrote, “He had extensive experience in debate…had been trained for years with the great minds and orators in Congress. He was full of political history, well informed on general topics, eloquent almost to the point of brilliancy, self-confident to the point of arrogance, and a dangerous competitor in every respect.”

Journalist Horace White added that Douglas’s experience gave him other strengths in debate. “He could make more out of a bad case, I think, than any other man this country had every produced,” and added that he had “unsurpassed powers of debate and strong personal magnetism.”
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The public was delighted that Lincoln and Douglas would engage in seven head-to-head debates. Political campaigns had, by 1858, become high entertainment, especially in the Midwest, where politicians had to travel great distances throughout states to reach all of the voters. The two- and three-hour-long “stump speeches,” with their before and after receptions, boisterous parades, and roaring bonfires, had become staples of politicking, and debates between candidates were always the highlight. Debates not only enabled both candidates to reach thousands of people at a single location, but permitted them to exhibit the full range of their oratorical skills, personalities, wit, and understanding of the issues. The stump speaker merely delivered a speech and left town, with someone from the other party coming through a day later to refute his charges. In a debate, both combatants, like Roman gladiators, directly rebutted each other.

The people could cheer for their man, jeer his opponent, and argue politics with their neighbors in the crowd at the same time. Most important, though, the debates were a wonderful opportunity to size up candidates for office based on their views and personalities—on display right in front of them.
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Even with all their preparation for the debates, and their hopes and dreams, neither Senator Stephen A. Douglas or Abraham Lincoln could foresee the dramatic consequences that the seven debates in Illinois would have on the Senate election, the presidential election of 1860, and the history of their country.

Chapter Seven

Senator Stephen Douglas’s triumphant parade through the streets of Chicago on July 9, packed with thousands of cheering supporters, had energized him. That night, as the parade ended, he stepped onto the balcony of the Tremont Hotel to address the crowd in the street below him, kicking off his reelection campaign against Abraham Lincoln. He explained the differences between his policies and Lincoln’s, but could not stop himself from taking yet another swipe at President Buchanan and his lieutenants, whose campaign against him had gained steam over the last few weeks.

Yet again Douglas denounced the Lecompton Constitution and told the crowd that popular sovereignty meant that the people, and not Congress, had the power to decide whether they wanted slavery in their state, that it was “as a permanent rule of public policy in the organization of territories and the admission of new states.”

And then he blasted the Buchanan Democrats, warning his supporters that they were determined to see him defeated, that they were “as much the agents, the tools, the supporters of Mr. Lincoln as if they were avowed Republicans.”
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The president, no longer content to stay in the shadows, fired back. Buchanan was friendly with the editors of the
Washington Union
; they had been dinner guests at the president’s summer quarters where, the editors of the
New York Times
charged, he gave them instructions for their virulent campaign against the Illinois senator. The
Union
turned up the vehemence of its attacks on Douglas, accusing him of “treachery” and of being a closet Republican—a “traitor” to his party. The
Union
’s editors charged that he was not only “a knave,” but the nation’s leading abolitionist.

The White House seemed to orchestrate the press campaign against Douglas because the Illinois Democratic newspapers loyal to Buchanan reprinted the vituperative attacks in the
Washington Union
within days of their publication. The editor of the
Quincy (Illinois) Whig
, as an example, quoted another paper’s assertion on July 21, 1858, that Douglas could not be considered a presidential candidate in 1860 given his dispute with the president and because he was a Northerner. His nomination was “entirely out of the question.” They all hammered away at the same theme—Douglas was finished.
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By the time the Lincoln-Douglas debates began in August, many political observers felt that the White House witch hunt of Douglas was no longer just about political disagreements. “It is wholly a personal matter,” wrote the editor of the
Illinois State Journal
.

A Douglas friend, editor John Heiss of the
Washington States
, wrote him that President Buchanan “hates you in the most bitter and unrelenting manner.” When he was in a good mood, the president informed party members in letters and conversations that his bitterness toward Douglas was not personal. He despised him, the president told them, because Douglas had led the fight against the Lecompton Constitution. It was just politics, and it was Buchanan’s job to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.”

But in private, he said that he would destroy the Little Giant. Thomas Harris told Charles Lamphier, a Douglas-supporting newspaper editor, that the president was telling people in Washington that he would fire every single federal office holder who opposed him in the feud with Douglas.
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