on the floor of the US Senate, Charles Sumner’s antislavery speech “The Crime Against Kansas” earned him a near-fatal pummeling at the hands of the South Carolinian Preston Brooks. “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” became the watchwords of the North.
The violence in Kansas haunted the May 29 antislavery convention in Bloomington, which turned out to be one of Lincoln’s peak moments. He reached oratorical heights just when America seemed poised in the balance, with Kansas seemingly capable of tipping the nation toward slavery or away from it. The Lawrence, Kansas, editor James S. Emery, whose newspaper press had been destroyed by a proslavery mob on May 21, talked about Kansas, a theme taken up by Lincoln in his speech. The awkward-looking, plainly dressed Lincoln gripped the audience with his eloquence—so much so that reporters forgot to write down his words. From the patchy reports we have of the so-called Lost Speech, we glean that he began with the history of American legislation on slavery, leading to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Reportedly, he mentioned two violent incidents in Kansas. But he did not dwell on violence, nor did he resort to sensational rhetoric. He strained toward unity. He was speaking before a varied audience, which included, on the conservative side, Old Line Whigs and Democrats and, on the radical side, higher-law Republicans. He rallied this mixed group around the goal of arresting the spread of slavery. As one listener reported, “Mr. Lincoln planned and perfected this union of widely diverse elements as no other man could have done. His ‘Lost Speech’ welded together these elements.”24 Similarly, the journalist John L. Scripps wrote that Lincoln’s speech “fused the mass of hitherto incongruous elements into perfect homogeneity.”25
In calling for a stop to slavery’s expansion without demanding the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act or interference with slavery where it already existed, Lincoln can hardly be said to have “abolitionized” the parties, as Douglas claimed. Not only had Lincoln postponed active engagement in the antislavery fusion movement, but he was not among the thirty-three Illinois delegates to the first national Republican Convention, held in Philadelphia on June 17, 1856. Even though a substantial segment of the convention voted for his candidacy as vice president, he did not attend the convention “for fear that he would be ‘platformed’—that is forced to accept some more extreme antislavery platform position, such as the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act.”26 It is telling, however, that he preferred as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate the Supreme Court justice John McLean, an antislavery radical, to the more moderate John Frémont.
Lincoln supported the 1856 Republican platform, which opposed the extension of slavery without venturing into the controversial territory of interfering with slavery itself or with the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln kept nonextension front and center in his vision, refusing to be diverted by the growing chorus of complaints about the abominable isms supposedly associated with the Republican Party and the North as a whole.
The chorus grew very loud in the mid-1850s, when not only Douglas’s Democrats but also the South’s leading social theorist, George Fitzhugh, cried out against the isms. In his book Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, Fitzhugh discussed what he called “the philosophy of the isms,” which, he said, dominated the Northern mind. Fitzhugh asked: “Why have you Bloomers and Women’s Rights men, and strong-minded women, and Mormons, and anti-renters, and ‘vote myself a farm men,’ Millerites, and Spiritual Rappers, and Shakers, and Widow Wakemanites, and Agrarians, and Grahamites, and a thousand other superstitious and infidel isms at the North?” “This unsettled, happy demented state of the human mind,” he wrote, proved “that free society is a failure.”27 For Fitzhugh, the fractured, frantic cultural climate of the North had been prepared for by “the Pilgrim fathers” in the “unctuous days of Knox and Cromwell,” whose individualistic ethos bred persecution and such horrors as the execution of witches.28
Lincoln refused to be sidetracked by the outcry against the isms. Slavery, he declared in August 1856, “should be not only the greatest question, but very nearly the sole question.” Noting the diversionary tactics of the proslavery side, he stated, “Our opponents, however, prefer that this should not be the case.” He again drove home his main point: “The question is simply this:—should slavery be spread into the new territories, or not? This is the naked question.”29
Along with the naked question went a central idea. “Our government rests in public opinion. . . . Public opinion, on any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That ‘central idea’ in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, ‘the equality of men.’”30
By laying down his main question and his central idea, Lincoln helped to pull the disparate elements of the Republican Party together. That unifying mission continued to dominate his mind, even when on June 16, 1858, he introduced the provocative image of the house divided in a speech in Springfield. Quoting Jesus’s words, he declared:
“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 is 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 another.31
The house divided metaphor, though ostensibly divisive, in fact simplified the national situation. America was not divided in the 1850s; it was fragmented—terribly so. Numerous isms made antebellum culture an ever-changing kaleidoscope, as projected in Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man, a disjointed, premodernist literary masterpiece whose shape-shifting hero assumes various cultural guises. And there were the competing factions within the Republican Party. By unifying the Republicans, Lincoln hoped he could heal the fragmented nation. Faced with “old differences, prejudices and animosities,” in his words, the party’s “members were drawn together by a paramount common danger”—the westward spread of slavery.32
The way Lincoln expressed the house divided message enforced his ideal of unity. He did not predict a civil war, nor did he follow William Henry Seward in proclaiming an irrepressible conflict. Instead, he repeated a passage from the Bible and put it in quotation marks. The house divided passage previously had circulated widely in many contexts. Lincoln himself had used it in his 1843 effort to unify the Whig Party. A dozen years later, in a letter to the Kentucky lawyer George Robertson, he asked, “Can we, as a nation, continue together—permanently—forever—half-slave, and half free?”33 The Richmond Enquirer, in an 1856 article he mentioned in several speeches, expressed this idea from a militantly proslavery perspective, with the dire statement that “the war between the two systems rages everywhere, and will continue to rage until the one conquers and the other is exterminated.”34 Lincoln, in contrast, expected the nation to turn wholly to freedom. Far from a naive belief or mere dream, this intuition was based on his faith in human improvement and his devotion to public opinion. The central idea of America—the equality of all humans—was threatened by proslavery enactments, most recently the Dred Scott decision, which asserted that black people had no rights that whites had to respect. What was needed was a forceful antislavery political leader who could express the nation’s central idea with special eloquence and tap into the antislavery instincts of the Northern public.
FIGHTING THE LITTLE GIANT
By the summer of 1858, Lincoln wanted to be that leader. He secured a public forum that, as it turned out, gave him national visibility. Selected by the Illinois Republican Party as its candidate for the US Senate, Lincoln challenged his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, to a series of debates over two months to be staged in various locations throughout the state. The debaters started out on August 21 in the upper middle of the state at Ottawa, proceeded to the nearby town to the northwest, Freeport, then went five hundred miles south to Jonesboro, in the section of the state known as Egypt; then on to the east-central town of Charleston, and then counterclockwise in a circle up to Galesburg, down to the center-west Quincy, ending up on October 15 in the southwest river town of Alton.
It was a taxing schedule for the debaters, especially given the fact that both of them made
many other campaign appearances that fall as well. Lincoln, traveling by railroad, carriage, or boat, gave more than 60 speeches and covered some 4,500 miles. The well-heeled Douglas, who moved about in a lavish private train fitted out with a booming cannon labeled “Popular Sovereignty,” reportedly gave 130 speeches and spent $50,000 on the campaign, as opposed to Lincoln’s modest $1,000
For the huge crowds that turned out for the debates—from around 1,200 to 1,500 in Jonesboro to nearly 20,000 in Galesburg and Ottawa—the verbal sparring between Douglas and Lincoln was part political discussion and part slugfest. The contrast between the short, stocky Little Giant and the tall, angular Long Abe made the debates a Barnumesque curiosity show—“the best circus in town,” as one reporter called it.36 Applause, cheering, laughter, and shouts of “Hit him again!” erupted throughout each speech. Newspapers slanted their reportage of the debates according to their political loyalties: stenographers from the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune tried to put Lincoln in a good light (for example, by giving him longer cheering and applause than his opponent), while the Democratic Chicago Times favored Douglas (by replacing his oft-repeated term “nigger” with “negro,” and so on).
Douglas and Lincoln each tried to appear moderate without losing touch with his base. Douglas’s right-leaning, racist base was indifferent about slavery; Lincoln’s left-leaning followers tended to oppose slavery on moral grounds without wholly surrendering the notion that black people were inferior to whites. Both men reached out to centrist voters while catering, as much as possible, to their more extreme party members.
For Douglas, the task was especially delicate because he had alienated many Southern-leaning Democrats by opposing the Lecompton Constitution, the 1857 proslavery state constitution in Kansas that had been supported by the administrations of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. Douglas had used Lecompton as a means of suggesting that he was fair on slavery—that is, he supported its expansion only when a territory or state followed a lawful election process, not a corrupt one, as Kansas had. His position won over some antislavery figures, including, for a time, the Republican editor Horace Greeley.
But Lincoln saw through the ruse. He knew Douglas didn’t care if slavery was voted up or down. His indifference was made clear by his unwavering support of the Dred Scott decision, which barred black people from citizenship. From a moral standpoint, Douglas was on the same page as Chief Justice Roger Taney and presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. These figures were so similar in their views that Lincoln had come up with the metaphor of an intricate structure built collaboratively by a team of four carpenters: Stephen, Roger, James, and Franklin. He had introduced this image in two speeches leading up to the debates, where he again used it.
Douglas, prepared for Lincoln’s accusation of a proslavery conspiracy, went on the attack immediately in the opening debate, offering his own conspiracy story, which blamed Lincoln for taking the lead in 1854 in abolitionizing the Illinois parties. Douglas repeated the story in later debates. Lincoln denied the charge and told how, in fact, he had rejected appeals to join the emerging antislavery party. Douglas’s repeated falsifications elicited different responses from Lincoln: anger, as when he leaped from his seat and advanced while Douglas was speaking, until he was pulled back by a colleague; feigned indifference (“I hate to waste my time on such things”); and exasperated humor (“I don’t know how to meet this kind of an argument. I don’t want to have a fight with Judge Douglas, and I have no way of making an argument up into the consistency of a corn-cob and stopping his mouth with it at all. [Laughter and applause].)”37
Douglas, for his part, tried to shrug off Lincoln’s idea of his having conspired with Taney, Pierce, and Buchanan to advance slavery. Regarding Lincoln’s “beautiful figure . . . about the building of a house,” Douglas said, “I am not green enough to let him make a charge which he acknowledges he does not know to be true, and then take up my time in answering it, when I know it to be false and nobody else knows it to be true. (Cheers.)”
Actually, neither conspiracy theory was accurate literally, but each had a large amount of truth in spirit. Although Douglas did not actively collude with the other “carpenters” to protect slavery, there was no need to. The four were similarly engaged in twisting the Constitution to lend support to slavery. By the same token, Lincoln did not participate in the plans of the antislavery radicals. But as he had said at Peoria in October 1854, he hated slavery as much as any abolitionist. And he saw that the Little Giant’s pose of neutrality was a mere cover for racism and amorality.
A clue to the different strategies of the debaters lies in the politicians and reformers Douglas associated Lincoln with in order to smear him. Those figures included Owen Lovejoy, whom Douglas mentioned thirty-seven times in the debates, Frederick Douglass (twenty times), Joshua Giddings (sixteen), and Ichabod Codding (four). Among others whom Douglas mentioned were Lyman Trumbull, Salmon P. Chase, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips.
Mentioning Garrison, Phillips, and Frederick Douglass was Douglas’s way of associating Lincoln with disruptive isms. These reformers supported not only abolitionism but also other movements held suspect by moderates, including women’s rights. The problem with bringing up these figures, however, was that Lincoln had never had any known contact with them before 1858. Also, he had carefully controlled his antislavery rhetoric to avoid appearing to be in the radical camp. During the Frémont campaign he had denounced slavery but had struggled not to sound like a radical abolitionist. A hostile newspaper suspected that “his niggerism has as dark a hue as that of Garrison or Fred Douglass” but noted that Lincoln “softened his remarks to a supposed palatable texture, . . . laboring under much restraint” to keep “within moderate bounds” in order to avoid alienating “the old whigs about him.”38
In the debates, Douglas, tossing facts aside, made a straight connection between Lincoln and the radicals. He found that referring to Frederick Douglass was a forceful way of tapping into his listeners’ racism.39 He received supportive cheers when he mocked Lincoln for having the African American leader among his team of advisers—a straight-out lie, but one so effective that he told other stories intended to cater to racial prejudice. Frederick Douglass, he said, had been seen, shockingly, sitting with a white woman in a carriage driven by a white man. Even worse, he had given a lecture in Chicago arranged by Lincoln’s supporters. (Shouts of “Shame on them” came from the audience.) And Lincoln, Douglas insisted, was, despite his show of Whiggish moderation, as much a Black Republican as Douglass or any other radical. Sneering at Lincoln’s position that people of all races were equal under the Declaration of Independence, Douglas said, “Did old Giddings, when he came down among you four years ago, preach more radical abolitionism than that? (‘No, never.’) Did Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass, ever take higher abolition grounds than that?”
Frederick Douglass once said that no one in that era did more than Stephen Douglas “to intensify hatred of the negro.”40 He may have been right. In a typical speech just before the debates, Douglas said that Lincoln, who “thinks the nigger is equal to the white man by Divine law,” wanted to eliminate the law forbidding African Americans from settling in Illinois. “When he lets down the bars,” Douglas said, then “the floods shall have turned in upon us and covered our prairies thick with them till they shall be as dark and black as night in mid-day,” and Lincoln “will apply the doctrine of nigger equality.”41 Lincoln, in response, quoted Douglas’s statements about blacks: “‘They are an inferior race.’ ‘Between the white man and the negro, he goes for the white man; but between the negro and the crocodile, he goes for the negro.’”42 What Douglas was really saying, Lincoln declared, was that “the white man may rightfully treat the negro as a beast or a reptile.” By this pernicious doctrine, he pointed out, “the negro is no longer a man but a brute,” and a “man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents.”
Douglas brandished his racism in the debates:
I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) I believe this government was made on the white basis. (“Good.”) I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favour of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other inferior races. (“Good for you.” “Douglas forever.”)43
Lincoln’s comments on race in the debates had a completely different tone. Although he made some racist statements, especially before the Southern-leaning audiences at Charleston and Jonesboro, he did so reluctantly and briefly, in response to Douglas’s incessant race-baiting. He told the Charleston audience that a man in his hotel had asked him if he really favored “producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.” Lincoln explained, “While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it.” He did not even devote five minutes to the topic. On the subject of citizenship for black people, he said, “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.” We should notice his deft use of verb tense here. To say “I am not nor ever have been” is very different from saying “I never will be.”
Had he spoken differently, he would have had little chance of attracting a large number of voters in a state that had some of the harshest black codes in the nation. He would have also seemed out of touch with what was then considered cutting-edge science. The nation’s leading scientist, Louis Agassiz of Harvard, opposed slavery yet maintained that “the brain of the Negro is that of the imperfect brain of a seven month’s infant in the womb of a White.”44 Such theories about racial inferiority would only intensify in the course of the nineteenth century. As respectful of black people
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