Team of Rivals (34 page)

With Douglas on their side, Republicans were thrilled, believing they now had a chance to keep Kansas from entering the Union as a slave state. “What can equal the caprices of politics?” Seward queried his wife the day after Douglas made his dramatic announcement. Throughout the entire decade, Seward explained, “the triumph of slavery…could not have occurred but for the accession to it of Stephen A. Douglas, the representative of the West.” His defection, Seward exulted, was “a great day for freedom and justice.” Old party enmities were forgotten as Eastern Republicans rushed to embrace Douglas as an ally in the fight against slavery. In the
Tribune,
Horace Greeley called on Illinois Republicans to cross party lines and endorse Douglas for senator in the upcoming race.

Lincoln at once understood the catastrophic implications for his own political prospects. Furthermore, knowing Douglas as he did, Lincoln believed that his “break” with the administration was but a temporary squabble over the facts of the situation in Kansas, rather than a change of heart on principle. Once the Kansas matter was settled, Lincoln suspected, Douglas would resume his long-standing alliance with the proslavery Democrats. In the meantime, duped Republican voters would have reelected Douglas, destroyed the Republican Party in Illinois, and ceded their voice in the Senate to a fundamentally proslavery politician.

Everywhere he went, lamented Lincoln, he was “accosted by friends” asking if he had read Douglas’s speech. “In every instance the question is accompanied with an anxious inquiring stare, which asks, quite as plainly as words could, ‘Can’t you go for Douglas now?’ Like boys who have set a bird-trap, they are watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under.”

“What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” Lincoln demanded of Trumbull. “Have they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacraficing us here in Illinois?” Even in his bleakest moods, Lincoln characteristically refused to attribute petty motives to Greeley, whom he considered “incapable of corruption.” While he recognized that Greeley would rather “see Douglas reelected over me or any other republican,” it was not because Greeley conspired with Douglas, but because “he thinks Douglas’ superior position, reputation, experience, and
ability,
if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position.” Lincoln felt much the same about Seward’s enthusiasm for Douglas’s reversal, despite the hazard it posed to his own chances.

To Lincoln’s immense relief, the interference of the Eastern Republicans only served to strengthen the determination of his friends and supporters. At hastily called conventions all over the state, resolutions were passed declaring that “Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate.” In an unprecedented move, since the ultimate decision would be made by the state legislature elected that fall, a statewide Republican convention in Springfield was called in June to officially nominate Lincoln for senator. “Lincoln’s rise from relative obscurity to a presidential nomination,” Don Fehrenbacher has convincingly argued, “includes no more decisive date than June 16, 1858,” when the convention met in Springfield and enthusiastically endorsed Lincoln as its “first and only choice…for the United States Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said, echoing the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, as he began his now famous acceptance speech at Springfield. Straightaway, he set forth an instantly accessible image of the Union as a house in danger of collapse under the relentless pressure of the slavery issue. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave
and half
free,”
he continued. “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.”

Supporters and opponents alike believed that with his image of a house that could not “endure, permanently half
slave
and half
free,”
Lincoln had abandoned the moderate approach of his Peoria speech four years earlier in favor of more militant action. His argument, however, remained essentially unchanged: slavery had seemed on the road to gradual extinction until the fateful passage of the Nebraska bill gave it new momentum. His call for action was no more radical than before—to “arrest the further spread” of slavery and “place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief” that it was back where the framers intended it, “in course of ultimate extinction.” The true change since the Peoria speech was not in Lincoln’s stance but in the designs of proslavery Democrats, who, he charged, had cunningly erected a new proslavery edifice to destroy the framers’ house of democracy.

Lincoln deftly illustrated what he, like Seward, considered a plot to overthrow the Constitution. Whereas Seward cited the days of the English king, Charles I, with an oblique reference to the Roman emperor Nero, to present a tableau of a tyrant’s coronation, Lincoln delineated the conspiracy with an everyday metaphor. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” Lincoln explained, “and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house…all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places…we find it impossible to not
believe
that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common
plan
or
draft
drawn up before the first lick was struck.” With these timbers in place, Lincoln warned, only one other “nice little niche” needed to be “filled with another Supreme Court decision,” declaring that the constitutional protection of private property prevented states as well as territories from excluding slavery from their limits. Then, in one fell swoop, all laws outlawing slavery in the Northern states would be invalidated.

If “the point of this rather elaborate [house] metaphor seems obscure today,” the historian James McPherson observes, “Lincoln’s audience knew exactly what he was talking about.” The four conniving Democratic carpenters were Stephen Douglas, architect of the lamentable Nebraska law and vocal defender of the
Dred Scott
decision; Franklin Pierce, the outgoing president who had used his last annual message to underscore the
“weight
and
authority”
of Supreme Court decisions even before the Court had completed its deliberations in the
Dred Scott
case; Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who had authored the revolutionary decision; and James Buchanan, the incoming president who had strongly urged compliance with the Supreme Court decision a full two days before the opinion was made public. Working together, these four men had put slavery on a path to “become alike lawful in
all
the States,
old
as well as
new—North
as well as
South.”

Reminding his audience that Douglas had always been among the foremost carpenters in the Democratic plan to nationalize slavery, Lincoln made it clear that the Republican cause must be “intrusted to, and conducted by its own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work” of shoring up the frame first raised by the founding fathers. While Douglas might be “a very
great
man,” and the “largest of
us
are very small ones,” he had consistently used his influence to distort the framers’ intentions regarding slavery, exhibiting a moral indifference to slavery itself. “Clearly, he is not
now
with us,” Lincoln stated, “he does not
pretend
to be—he does not
promise
to
ever
be.”

The image of America as an unfinished house in danger of collapse worked brilliantly because it provided a ringing challenge to the Republican audience, a call for action to throw out the conspiring carpenters, unseat the Democratic Party, and recapture control of the nation’s building blocks—the laws that had wisely prevented the spread of slavery. Only then, Lincoln claimed, with the public mind secure in the belief that slavery was once more on a course to eventual extinction, would the people in all sections of the country live together peaceably in the great house their forefathers had built.

In the campaign that followed, Douglas would strenuously deny that he had ever conspired with Taney and Buchanan before the
Dred Scott
decision. “What if Judge Douglas never did talk with Chief Justice Taney and the President,” replied Lincoln. “It can only show that he was
used
by conspirators, and was not a
leader
of them.” This charge reflected his agreement with Seward and Chase that—whether there was an explicit conspiracy—there was a mutual intent by the slave power to extend slavery. Edward Bates also feared that Southern radicals “planned to seize control of the federal government and nationalize slavery.”

S
O THE STAGE WAS SET
for a titanic battle, arguably the most famous Senate fight in American history, a clash that would make Lincoln a national figure and propel him to the presidency while it would, at the same time, undermine Douglas’s support in the South and further fracture the Democratic Party.

In keeping with political strategy followed to this day, Lincoln, the challenger, asked Douglas to campaign with him so they could debate the issues. The incumbent, Douglas, who boasted a national reputation and deep pockets, had little to gain from debating Lincoln and initially refused the challenge, but eventually felt compelled to participate in the seven face-to-face debates known to history as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

In the course of the campaign, both men covered over 4,000 miles within Illinois, delivering hundreds of speeches. The northern part of the state was Republican territory. In the southern counties, populated largely by migrants from the South, the proslavery sentiment dominated. The election would be decided in the central section of Illinois, where the debates became the centerpiece of the struggle. With marching bands, parades, fireworks, banners, flags, and picnics, the debates brought tens of thousands of people together with “all the devoted attention,” one historian has noted, “that many later Americans would reserve for athletic contests.”

Attending the debate in Quincy, the young Republican leader Carl Schurz recounted how “the country people began to stream into town for the great meeting, some singly, on foot or on horseback, or small parties of men and women, and even children, in buggies or farm wagons; while others were marshaled in solemn procession from outlying towns or districts…. It was indeed the whole American people that listened to those debates,” continued Schurz, later remarking that “the spectacle reminded one of those lays of ancient times telling us of two armies in battle array, standing still to see their two principal champions fight out the contested cause between the lines in single combat.” The debates, said Lincoln in Quincy, “were the successive acts of a drama…to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like this, but in the face of the nation.”

“On the whole,” Schurz observed, “the Democratic displays were much more elaborate and gorgeous than those of the Republicans, and it was said that Douglas had plenty of money to spend for such things. He himself also traveled in what was called in those days ‘great style,’ with a secretary and servants and a numerous escort of somewhat loud companions, moving from place to place by special train with cars specially decorated for the occasion, all of which contrasted strongly with Lincoln’s extreme modest simplicity.”

Each debate followed the same rules. The first contestant spoke for an hour, followed by a one-and-a-half-hour response, after which the man who had gone first would deliver a half-hour rebuttal. The huge crowds were riveted for the full three hours, often interjecting comments, cheering for their champion, bemoaning the jabs of his opponent. Newspaper stenographers worked diligently to take down every word, and their transcripts were swiftly dispatched throughout the country.

“No more striking contrast could have been imagined than that between those two men as they appeared upon the platform,” one observer wrote. “By the side of Lincoln’s tall, lank, and ungainly form, Douglas stood almost like a dwarf, very short of stature, but square-shouldered and broad-chested, a massive head upon a strong neck, the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying power.”

The highly partisan papers concocted contradictory pictures of crowd response and outcome. At the end of the first debate, the Republican Chicago
Press and Tribune
reported that “when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front.” Observing the same occasion, the Democratic
Chicago Times
claimed that when it was over, Douglas’s “excoriation of Lincoln” had been so successful and “so severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame.”

The people of Illinois had followed the careers of Douglas and, to a lesser extent, Lincoln for nearly a quarter of a century as they represented opposing parties in the State House, in Congress, and on the campaign trail. Indeed, in the opening debate at Ottawa, Douglas spoke of his first acquaintance with Lincoln when they were “both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land,” when Lincoln was “just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody,” as well as the lifelong epithet “Honest Abe.”