American Experiment (105 page)

But the issue of slavery could no longer be evaded. In Kansas the crisis would not simmer down. Ensconced in their rival “capitals,” proslavery and antislavery Kansans eyed one another belligerently and boycotted each other’s elections while the nation watched with excitement. Knowing that they were in the minority, the proslavery forces planned to hold a constitutional convention, rigged to overrepresent their side, that would protect slavery under the fundamental law. Held in Lecompton in the fall of 1857, this convention, recognizing that such a constitution would be defeated in a properly conducted popular vote, proposed to withhold the charter from the people and submit to them a special article that guaranteed the right of property in slaves. Even if the special article should be rejected, the right to hold property in slaves already in the territory would be protected. The proposition, a Kansan said, was “Vote to take this arsenic with bread and butter, or without bread and butter.”

Once again the Free Soilers erupted in indignation. “The Great Swindle,” thundered the Emporia
Kansas News.

What would Buchanan do? He had sent to Kansas a governor, Robert J. Walker, who promised that any constitution adopted by a constitutional convention would have to be submitted to Kansans for a fair vote. Now he was in a box. He knew that by supporting Lecompton he would probably break his party into pieces. Yet southern ultras were demanding that the entire constitution be sent direct to Washington, where the Democratic Congress would legislate it and the Democratic President sign it. Most of the southern leadership, including Southerners in Buchanan’s own Cabinet, supported the Lecompton forces. Buchanan was dependent on southern support politically; of his 174 electoral votes in 1856, 112 had come from the South. He would need southern support if he ran again in 1860; he would need southern support in the Democratic convention, with its two-thirds rule; he would continue to need southern support to get his bills through Congress. And beyond all these practical concerns was his fear that the South would secede if it lost the game in Kansas—already proslavery firebrands were making threats. Yielding to this massed southern power, the President publicly endorsed the Lecompton plan.

Stephen Douglas was in a terrible dilemma. His political ambitions too depended on southern favor. Still aspiring to the presidency, he might—with backing from his southern friends—head off Buchanan for the Democratic nomination in 1860. But he was also the celebrated spokesman for “squatter sovereignty,” and now he waited only to know whether his
doctrine had been violated. “The only question,” he wrote a friend, “is whether the constitution formed at Lecompton is the act & will…of a small minority, who have attempted to cheat & defraud the majority by trickery & juggling.” As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Douglas received constant intelligence from Kansas, and he did not have long to wait to learn the truth. The Lecompton plan, he decided, was a fraud, a mockery. He could not sanction it without “repudiating all the acts of my life.” But to attack Lecompton now, he knew, would break his ties with the President and with the South, lead to his being cast out of the Democratic party leadership, and jeopardize his committee chairmanship in the Senate. Returning to Washington, he hurried to the White House. A stiff confrontation followed.

“Mr. Douglas,” said Buchanan as the talk came to an end, “I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from the Administration of his own choice without being crushed.…”

“Mr. President,” replied Douglas, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”

The clerk had barely completed reading the President’s annual message to Congress, on December 8, 1857, when Douglas was on his feet to express his total dissent on the Lecompton issue. In his major address a day later the Illinois senator spoke once again for popular sovereignty. “I have spent too much strength and breath, and health, too, to establish this great principle in the popular heart, now to see it frittered away.” The packed gallery and lobby broke into a tumult as he concluded, “If this constitution is to be forced down our throats, in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and an insult, I will resist it to the last.”

Suddenly the Little Giant did not look so small to his old Republican and Unionist foes. A courtship followed, as Republican members of Congress called on Douglas and discussed common efforts against Lecompton. Horace Greeley visited him too, and speculation arose that more must have been discussed than parliamentary tactics. Would Douglas join the Republicans? Or could he persuade Republicans and old-time Whigs to swing over to his cause? In severing his ties with southern ultras, Douglas had bolstered his position as leader of the northern Democrats. While the southern junta laid plans to help defeat him in his Senate re-election race and to strip him of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, eastern Republicans talked openly of backing Douglas in his Senate race in 1858 and for the presidency in 1860.

These reports galvanized the Illinois Republicans into action. From Herndon in Springfield, Greeley in New York received an indignant letter.
Was Greeley backing Douglas? Was he going to “sell us out” in Illinois “without our consent to accomplish some
national
political purpose”? Greeley should not raise Douglas over the heads of long-term and well-tried Republicans, who had never flinched. “We want the man
that we want
; and it is not for N. York—Seward—Mass—Banks or any other state or man” to tell Illinois Republicans whom they should have. “We want to be our own masters.”

It was a critical moment for Lincoln. Greeley’s
Tribune
was influential in Illinois, with a circulation rapidly heading toward 20,000 in that state alone. Stealing Douglas from the Democracy, Lincoln knew, was a tempting thought for Illinois Republicans. It was a critical moment for Illinois Republicans too, and it was they—the “third cadre” of grass-roots activists—who now took leadership. By mid-1858 the rank-and-file leaders had come to like and esteem the tall, humorous, sad, tolerant, thoughtful man from Springfield. They liked him also because by now he had firmly embraced the Republican party, not merely the antislavery movement. With Lincoln’s encouragement, but without his active leadership, Republicans meeting in scores of county conventions spontaneously called for him to be chosen to run against Douglas at the party’s state convention to be held in Springfield. There was no precedent for using a state party convention to nominate a candidate for United States senator, but the Illinois Republicans, in a burst of political creativity, did that on June 16, 1858, by designating Lincoln the party’s “first, last, and only choice” for senator.

“I want to see ‘old gentleman Greely’s’ notice of our Republican Convention,” Herndon wrote. “—I itch—I burn, to see what he says….” The Illinois Republicans had happily defied the patronizing and meddlesome eastern press that was trying to sacrifice them to its national coalition building. The men of Illinois had done much more. They had launched Lincoln on his national career; they had turned a shank of history; and they had set the stage for the most significant debate—and the most remarkable public intellectual encounter—in American history.

Lincoln moved to the attack within a few hours of his nomination by acclamation at the state convention. The 1,500 delegates adjourned for supper, then reconvened in the stifling Representatives Hall. Some in the perspiring crowd urged him to move the meeting out to the front steps, but Lincoln persuaded them to stay inside because his voice was not in the best condition to reach a crowd outside. This night he wanted to be heard. He had long been shaping this speech in his mind, working over its phrases, and he had even rehearsed it the previous night before Herndon
and other friends, only to be told that it was too radical, too incendiary.

Now he stood before the delegates, a gangling figure in frock coat, bow tie, rumpled vest and trousers. He wasted no time on pleasantries:

“If we could first know
where
we are, and
whither
we are tending, we could then better judge
what
to do, and
how
to do it.”

Lincoln was reading from a manuscript with underlined key words.

“We are now far into
the fifth
year, since a policy was initiated, with the
avowed
object, and
confident
promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.” All recognized the reference to the Kansas-Nebraska act.

“Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only,
not ceased
, but has
constantly augmented.

“In
my
opinion, it
will
not cease, until a
crisis
shall have been reached, and passed.

“ ‘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.…”

Free or slave. All one thing or all another. Suddenly this moderate, prudent man had started talking like an abolitionist. But Lincoln knew precisely what he was about. Intensely worried by the Republican flirtation with Douglas, he would destroy the middle ground on which Douglas was standing and indict the senator as part of a grand conspiracy to spread slavery throughout the nation. Lincoln’s purpose emerged in his very next sentence:

“Either the
opponents
of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its
advocates
will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in
all
the States,
old
as well as
new
—
North
as well as
South.
”

Lincoln spelled out the conspiracy he was alleging. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise via the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the endorsement of that repeal by the Supreme Court, and the endorsement of the endorsement by President Buchanan, the plots, said Lincoln, lacked only “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a
state
to exclude slavery from its limits.” Was it absolutely certain that Douglas and Pierce, Taney and Buchanan, had acted by “preconcert”? Well, said Lincoln, “when we see a lot of framed timbers” perfectly put together “by different workmen—Stephen,
Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” it was hard to believe that the four had not worked on a common plan “before the first lick was struck.”

Having centered his convention attack on Douglas and played down his own position, Lincoln kept on the offensive. To Douglas’ vast irritation, he continued to dog the senator’s footsteps, attend his speeches, and announce to Douglas’ throngs that a rebuttal would follow later in the day. Late in July, hoping to share a platform with Douglas rather than following him, Lincoln challenged Douglas to more than fifty debates in all the places—at least fifty—Douglas was scheduled to appear. Ready for combat but unwilling to share so many audiences with Lincoln, Douglas proposed they debate at a central point in each congressional district in the state, save for Springfield and Chicago, where each had already spoken. That would mean seven debates—in Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg, Quincy, Jonesboro, Charleston, and Alton. Lincoln accepted.

The debates that followed were grand theater. They were also a striking display of political craftsmanship on both sides; and they represented the intellectual climax of the grand debates over slavery that had been echoing throughout the land for decades.

Douglas supplied most of the theater. Merely traveling from town to town, the senator was a sight to see. When he arrived back in Chicago from Washington, artillery roared a 150-gun salute; banners hung from windows and over the streets; flags fluttered on ships and buildings. When he journeyed down to Springfield, a flatcar on his special train carried a twelve-pound cannon that continually boomed out across the prairie. Rockets and fireworks climaxed his evening speeches. The intensive railroad building in Illinois was already affecting campaigning; Douglas could rest or receive delegations in his ornate private car between speeches, and regular and special trains brought listeners by the thousands.

Still, the pastoral folk memory of the debates was valid too—the memory of farmers arriving in buckboards, buggies, carriages, and carts, of roads so enveloped in dust as to resemble great smokehouses, of farmers in overalls and their wives in hoop skirts and young mothers with babies at their breasts standing in the burning sun for two or three hours. With his homespun face, hollowed cheeks, and tangled hair, Lincoln looked more like the hired hand in Sunday garb than the wealthy attorney that he was; Douglas, with his shiny black hair, shiny top hat, shiny black vest, and shiny black footwear, appeared every inch the city man, traveled and worldly. Each respected the oratorical prowess of his adversary. Douglas was all force, pacing up and down the platform, tossing his huge head and locks, blasting out cannonades of questions and accusations. Lincoln was supple,
sinewy, tenacious. Douglas himself took the best measure of his opponent, when informed of Lincoln’s nomination:

“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 my victory will be hardly won.”

Like master chess players, each man tried to put the other on the defensive. In the first debate, in Ottawa, Douglas posed seven questions for Lincoln, centering mainly on the question of race. Here Douglas felt on safe ground, given the anti-Negro attitudes so widespread in the state. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.” Douglas’ belief in the innate inferiority of blacks was the key to his entire approach to slavery. It enabled him to consider the issue a matter of local preference, of popular sovereignty. To soothe the troubled consciences of Illinois free-soil sympathizers, who were expanding in numbers, the senator argued that popular sovereignty would keep slavery out of the territories, since slavery had already reached its natural limits and would not thrive where the soil and climate were inhospitable.