Lincoln (44 page)

After Douglas’s rebuttal most in the audience hunted up any missing members of the family and made a break for home, where the horses had to be watered and the cattle fed. More dedicated partisans gathered around to congratulate the rival candidates. As Douglas left the stand, according to the partisan
Illinois State Register,
“nearly the entire crowd pressed around him, and the living mass, with shouts and hurras bore him, in their midst, to the hotel, the cheering and shouting being kept up incessantly.” Lincoln’s partisans were equally enthusiastic, and, in what proved to be an unfortunate effort to show approval, a dozen or so sturdy Republicans put him on their shoulders and, preceded by a band, carried him to the mayor’s house. He was clearly uncomfortable, and the hostile reporter Henry Villard thought it was a ludicrous sight to see Lincoln’s “grotesque figure holding frantically on to the heads of his supporters,” while his legs were “dangling from their shoulders, and his pantaloons pulled up so as to expose his underwear almost to his knees.”

Some of Lincoln’s friends feared that he had exposed more than that at the Ottawa debate. A few, like Richard Yates, reported that they were
“well satisfied”
with his performance, and Lincoln himself was reasonably content with the outcome, reporting the next day, “The fire flew some, and I am glad to know I am yet alive.” But most of his advisers thought he had not been sufficiently forceful or aggressive. Ray, about to leave on a business trip to New York, enjoined Congressman Washburne: “When you see Abe at Freeport, for God’s sake tell him to ‘Charge Chester! Charge!’ Do not let him keep on the defensive.” Joseph Medill, of the same newspaper, also urged Lincoln to change his tactics. “Dont act on the
defensive
at all,” he urged. “Dont refer to your past speeches or positions,... but hold Dug up as a traitor and conspirator a proslavery bamboozelling demogogue.”

On reflection, Lincoln himself was sufficiently worried about his performance at Ottawa to call a kind of summit meeting of his advisers to discuss
how he should respond to Douglas’s interrogatories. Gathering in Chicago on August 26, they called for a reconsideration of Lincoln’s campaign strategy, and Medill, reporting for his colleagues, told Lincoln that he should “put a few ugly questions” of his own to Douglas the next day, at Freeport.

At Freeport, Lincoln was clearly more in charge than he had been at Ottawa, only a week earlier. Before this sympathetic “vast audience as strongly tending to Abolitionism as any audience in the State of Illinois,” he turned first to answering the interrogatories Douglas had posed at Ottawa. His answers contained no surprises: He was not in favor of repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. He did not “stand pledged” against the admission of additional slave states to the Union (though he would be “exceedingly sorry” to have to pass on that question) nor against the admission of a new state with whatever constitution its inhabitants might see fit to make. He did not “stand to-day pledged” to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (but he would be very glad to see it accomplished) or the prohibition of the interstate slave trade (though he admitted that he had not thought much about this subject). He was, on the other hand, “impliedly, if not expressly, pledged” to prohibit slavery in all federal territories. As to acquiring additional territory, he “would or would not oppose such acquisition,” depending on whether it “would nor would not aggravate the slavery question among ourselves.”

Then, finally’ taking the offensive, he posed to Douglas four questions of his own—four questions that were much like those that his Chicago advisers had recommended. First, would Douglas favor the admission of Kansas before it had the requisite number of inhabitants, as specified in the English bill? Second, could “the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,... exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?” Third, would Douglas acquiesce in and follow a decision of the Supreme Court declaring that states could not exclude slavery from their limits? Finally, did he favor acquisition of additional territory “in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question?”

The second was the key question. Though advisers like Medill urged him to raise it, Lincoln had hesitated before asking it. He was in no doubt about how Douglas would answer; and, just as he expected, Douglas promptly replied that the passage of “unfriendly legislation” could keep slavery out of any territory because “slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.” Consequently—as “Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois”—“the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution.” Though Lincoln predicted this reply, which became known as the Freeport Doctrine, he
thought it important to have Douglas state it explicitly; otherwise, as he wrote a friend, it would be “hard work to get him directly to the point.” As long as Douglas could fudge the issue, he could pretend that he was loyal to the national party and even to the national administration. But when he was forced to make his position clear, he would further outrage President Buchanan and his advisers, who believed that the Dred Scott decision had killed popular sovereignty, and his stand would widen the division between Douglas Democrats and the Danites in Illinois. But by showing how greatly at odds Douglas was with the National Democracy, Lincoln risked undermining his basic argument that Douglas was part of a broad conspiracy to extend and perpetuate slavery. Nevertheless, pressed to take the offensive and realizing that this question might rattle his opponent, Lincoln decided to include the question.

Then, taking advantage of the research that Herndon and others had done for him in the Springfield newspapers, Lincoln dropped his bombshell. The abolition resolutions that Douglas had so elaborately read at Ottawa, which Lincoln allegedly endorsed, were not, as it turned out, ever adopted by any group in Springfield, much less at any meeting that Lincoln attended; they were passed by a convention or public meeting in Kane County. Indignantly Lincoln announced that it was
“most extraordinary”
that Douglas “should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary, or of prudence to himself, as to venture upon the assertion [concerning these resolutions]... which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false.”

The revelation momentarily disconcerted Douglas, but he was such a skilled debater that he quickly recovered. Using diversionary tactics, he charged that Lincoln was avoiding either endorsing or repudiating these abolitionist resolutions by claiming that the platform had not been adopted “on the right ‘spot,’” and that gave him an opportunity to attack Lincoln’s “spot” resolutions criticizing the Mexican War. Sensing that this tactic was failing, he provoked the audience by repeatedly calling them “Black Republicans.” When they began chanting “White, white” every time he used the phrase, he denounced them, announcing proudly, “I have seen your mobs before, and defy your wrath.”

Nearly everyone agreed that Lincoln made a stronger showing at Freeport than in the first debate, and his devoted supporters, like Herndon, were convinced that “so far Lincoln has the decided advantage” in the contest. One distant admirer, a writer in the
Lowell
(Massachusetts)
Journal and Courier
even announced that Lincoln’s speeches were so telling that people were “now calculating his fitness and chances for a more elevated position.” But Washburne, a more objective reporter, found after the Freeport debate that “neither party was fully satisfied with the speeches, and the meeting broke up without any display of enthusiasm.” In a confidential letter Medill confessed that Lincoln was not Douglas’s equal on the stump and predicted the senator would be reelected. Nearly all the Republicans felt relieved that
Lyman Trumbull, who was considered a better speaker and had a wider reputation than Lincoln, had returned from Washington to assist the Republican cause.

Lincoln knew he was at a disadvantage in the third debate, at Jonesboro, an isolated town of 842 inhabitants in Union County, in the extreme southern part of the state. Settled by Southerners who had migrated chiefly from Kentucky and Tennessee, “Egypt” was solidly Democratic and overwhelmingly negrophobic. Rural, mostly poor, and relatively untouched by commercial ambition, voters in Union County had little use for the Republican party and its candidate. Fewer than 2,000 listeners attended the debate.

Lincoln and Douglas rehashed the issues they had raised in the previous debates, developing few ideas and adding little new information. Furious that Trumbull, that “excrescence from the rotten bowels of the Democracy,” was now taking such a prominent part in the campaign, Douglas renewed his charge that Lincoln and Trumbull had conspired to abolitionize both parties in Illinois, and he now added, in the hope of dividing his opponents, the accusation that Trumbull in the 1855 election had “played a Yankee trick” on Lincoln, in order to secure his own, rather than Lincoln’s, election to the Senate that year. Then, in an effort to goad Lincoln into responding, he elaborated on some of the racist charges he had made earlier in the campaign, announcing that “the signers of the Declaration [of Independence] had no reference to the negro whatever, when they declared all men to be created equal.”

Shrewdly Lincoln refused to be baited. He knew there was no possibility of persuading this audience (“very few of whom are my political friends,” he noted), and he avoided the issue of equal rights for Negroes. Much of his time he devoted to attacking Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine, which threatened the credibility of Lincoln’s charge that the senator was engaged in a conspiracy to expand slavery. Lincoln insisted that Douglas’s claim that slavery could not enter a new territory without police protection was “historically false,” for there was “vigor enough in slavery to plant itself in a new country even against unfriendly legislation.”

At Charleston, three days later, he was on more hospitable ground. Many in Coles County had known Thomas Lincoln and his family, and some enthusiasts spread a gigantic painting, eighty feet long, across the main street, showing OLD ABE THIRTY YEARS AGO, on a Kentucky wagon pulled by three yoke of oxen. Democrats countered with a banner, captioned “Negro Equality,” which depicted a white man standing with a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy in the background. Republicans found this so offensive that they tore it down before allowing the debate to begin.

Lincoln picked up on that theme in his opening remarks. He had, he said, recently been approached by an elderly man who wanted to know whether
he was in favor of perfect equality between blacks and whites. This probably hypothetical inquiry gave him the opportunity to make his views explicit in a community where conservative old Whigs were strong. “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he announced. “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” “There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality,” he went on to add.

This was a politically expedient thing to say in a state where the majority of the inhabitants were of Southern origin; perhaps it was a necessary thing to say in a state where only ten years earlier 70 percent of the voters had favored a constitutional amendment to exclude all blacks from Illinois. It also represented Lincoln’s deeply held personal views, which he had repeatedly expressed before. Opposed to slavery throughout his life, he had given little thought to the status of free African-Americans. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not personally hostile to blacks; indeed, Frederick Douglass remarked on “his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.” But he did not know whether they could ever fit into a free society, and, rather vaguely, he continued to think of colonization as the best solution to the American race problem.

Turning from this subject abruptly, Lincoln inexplicably devoted most of his Charleston opening speech to endorsing a charge, originally made by Trumbull, that Douglas, despite his protestations of opposition to the Lecompton Constitution, had really been part of a plot to impose slavery on Kansas. The story was intricate and confusing, involving secret proceedings in Senate committees and parliamentary maneuvering in the Senate itself, and Douglas had flatly announced that Trumbull’s evidence for the alleged plot “was forged from beginning to end.” Unwilling to see Trumbull calumniated, Lincoln now leapt to his defense with a tedious and unconvincing review of the charge.

Douglas expressed amazement that Lincoln had spent nearly his entire time on this discredited issue. Rather petulantly he asked: “Why, I ask, does not Mr. Lincoln make a speech of his own instead of taking up his time reading Trumbull’s speech?” Scornfully he declared, “I thought I was running against Abraham Lincoln, that he claimed to be my opponent.” It was, he concluded, “unbecoming the dignity of a canvass” to spend time on “these petty personal matters.”

After Charleston, the lowest point in his campaign, Lincoln made a splendid recovery in the final three engagements with Douglas. The debate at Galesburg, which took place on the campus of Knox College, attracted one of the
largest crowds, and in this antislavery area, heavily settled by Scandinavians, the audience was enthusiastic for the Republican candidate. Douglas, who was clearly tiring in the protracted campaign and was beginning to lose his voice, gave his standard speech, defending his unfailing fidelity in supporting the right of self-government and bitterly attacking the “unholy and unnatural combination” of Republicans and National Democrats against him. Lincoln, he claimed, was a political chameleon, advocating “bold and radical Abolitionism” in the extreme northern part of Illinois but professing in the central and southern counties to be “an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay”; at Chicago, Lincoln announced his belief in Negro equality, but at Charleston, he declared that there must be a superior and an inferior race. By contrast, Douglas asserted, his own views were clear and fixed. He knew that the authors of the Declaration of Independence never intended to include the Negro and that “this Government was made by our fathers on the white basis... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”