as Lincoln was when he dealt with them personally, while running for office in 1858 against a man who railed endlessly at his “Black Republicanism,” he sometimes aired hidebound racial views.
His concessions to racial conservatism were counterbalanced by surprisingly progressive statements. He declared that “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. . . . [I]n the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. [Great applause.]”45
This pronouncement and others like it by Lincoln showed how far apart he and Douglas were in their views of race and self-government. For Douglas, black people were incapable of self-government because of their innate inferiority. For Lincoln, they were fully as capable in controlling themselves and making a living as whites. Self-government for Douglas meant the right of white citizens of each state to decide on that state’s institutions, including slavery. Self-government for Lincoln meant majority rule in communities, as established by the Constitution, but also self-rule for individuals, which stemmed from both the Founders and the early Puritans.
In respecting both types of self-government, Lincoln resembled the Illinois politician Owen Lovejoy. Although early on Lincoln had kept a distance from Lovejoy because of his bold antislavery politics, the two had grown closer over time, and by 1858 they were virtually political twins. Or, rather, Lovejoy was Lincoln’s radical alter ego; he often said explicitly what Lincoln couched in more moderate language.
A bluff, large man with striking blue eyes, Lovejoy loved telling jokes but saw slavery as no joking matter. He approached the institution with all the seriousness of his brother Elijah Lovejoy, the editor who had been killed while confronting an antiabolitionist mob in 1837.
And Owen Lovejoy valued his Puritan roots. Born and raised in Maine, he moved to Illinois and trained for the Congregational ministry. He preached for years in a Princeton, Illinois, church that was described as “purely an offshoot of Massachusetts,” made up of “men direct from Plymouth Rock and many of whose ancestors came over in the Mayflower, and nearly all of whom were of the purest Puritan stock.”46
After leaving the ministry and turning wholly to politics in 1856, Lovejoy directed his Puritan intensity against slavery. In his famous speech “Human Beings Not Property,” delivered before Congress in February 1858, he declared that the divine right of kings had oppressed humankind for ages until God inspired the Puritans to found a nation built on self-rule. “America was the theatre where this manifestation was to be made,” Lovejoy said. “The old Pilgrim barks, borne as by a miracle over the angry ocean, came freighted with the elements of a new political life, and the germ of a new national organization.” This idea of self-government spread until it inspired many Americans. “Then came the crisis of our fate!” Lovejoy declared. “Our ancestors, Cavalier and Roundhead . . . met that crisis manfully, heroically.” The joint Northern and Southern effort in the Revolution toppled tyranny and enacted Jefferson’s immortal words about equality in the Declaration. Jefferson, Lovejoy noted, did “not say that all English men are born equal, or all French men, or all Scotch men, or all Dutch men, or all white men, or all tawny men, or all black men, but ALL MEN.”47
Lincoln promoted this broad interpretation of human equality so persistently that Douglas charged him with merely imitating Lovejoy. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglas said, “is very much in the habit of following in the track of Lovejoy in this particular, by reading that part of the Declaration of Independence to prove that the negro was endowed by the Almighty with the inalienable right of equality with white men,” when, in fact, Douglas said, the Founders meant “white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men.”48
Douglas saw that Lincoln was influenced by Lovejoy in other ways as well. In the opening debate, he said, “Lincoln has evidently learned by heart Parson Lovejoy’s catechism. (Laughter and applause.)”
Douglas was right. Several of Lincoln’s arguments were a virtual gloss of statements made by Lovejoy.
Take the relationship between the American economy and slavery. Douglas defended popular sovereignty by saying that just as different farm products and businesses prospered in different states, so slavery was a state decision and would grow only where it was enforced by local police regulations. Lincoln replied that slavery was wholly different from the production of goods. The “variety in the industrial pursuits and productions of a country,” he noted, “produces commerce, brings us together, and makes us better friends. We like one another the more for it.”49 Slavery, in contrast, created discord. Every time it had come up for national discussion, from the Missouri crisis of 1820 to the fight over Kansas-Nebraska in the 1850s, sectional tensions escalated and murmurings of civil war were heard.
Lovejoy had made the same point six months earlier in his congressional speech. All sections of the nation, he pointed out, were bound by economic relations. Commerce fostered cohesion. Only slavery disrupted the national scene. “The territorial extent of our country,” Lovejoy said, “the variety of its productions, and the range of its climate, are, if left to their natural operation, elements of strength, union, prosperity, and harmony.” Slavery had the potential to “hurl us . . . into ruin and chaos.”50 Like Lincoln, Lovejoy thought that abolishing slavery could be a gradual process. Calling for the “ultimate extermination” of slavery, Lovejoy announced to the South: “We shall not push you. If you say that you want a quarter of a century, you can have it; if you want half a century, you can have it. But I insist that this system must ultimately be extinguished.”51
Ultimate extinction became Lincoln’s mantra in 1858. He aired it publicly in July in the “House Divided” speech and repeated in other addresses, including the debates with Douglas. He anchored the idea firmly in the goals of the Founders, who, he said, had tolerated slavery but had regarded it as an evil that must disappear over time. As he said in the Ottawa debate, “I believe if we could arrest the spread, and place [slavery] where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction.”52
Lovejoy had estimated it would take twenty-five to thirty years for slavery to disappear. Lincoln guessed it could take twice that long: “I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least; but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God’s own good time, I have no doubt.”
It’s difficult today to imagine slavery lasting in America until 1958, but that’s how intractable the institution seemed when Lincoln spoke these words, in the fall of 1858. Douglas insisted that Lincoln’s House Divided statement meant “boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states—a war of extermination—to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued.”53 Lincoln’s reply was simple: “Not war.” He discounted any other than a peaceful solution. There was no chance that Kentuckians would “shoulder their muskets and . . . march into Illinois,” and “no danger of our going over there and making war upon them.”54 Change would have to come slowly, through the electoral process But—and this was the key point for Lincoln—change must come, no matter how long it took. There was no retreat. Slavery was a wrong that must be obliterated.
“IT IS THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN THESE TWO PRINCIPLES—RIGHT AND WRONG—THROUGHOUT THE WORLD”
Wasn’t this something like the higher law—the loose cannon that Lincoln denigrated? If so, in Lincoln’s view, it was a higher law advocated by the Founders, who had envisaged the end of slavery because it conflicted with the Declaration’s doctrine of human equality. On the issue of law, Lincoln made sure that Douglas was hoist on his own petard. Douglas had attacked Lincoln for not respecting the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, but Lincoln reminded listeners that Douglas himself renounced Dred Scott by promoting popular sovereignty, which hailed local rules—what Douglas called “police regulations”—as the final arbiter of slavery, whereas Dred Scott in fact superseded local rules by requiring states, even those that had voted to be free soil, to respect ownership of blacks who had been enslaved elsewhere. Douglas, in short, was adrift in moral relativism and illogic.
Lincoln’s choice of a Bible quotation as his symbol of the slavery conflict was a gesture toward the higher law of religion. When Douglas criticized Lincoln for saying that a house divided could not stand, Lincoln asked, “Does the Judge say it can stand? [Laughter.] . . . If he does, then there is a question of veracity, not between him and me, but between the Judge and an authority of a somewhat higher character. [Laughter and applause.]” Lincoln here reminded Douglas of the sacred text from which the house divided image came.55
Lincoln was now ready to follow Owen Lovejoy by emphasizing publicly the dictates of morality. Lovejoy, the brashly open Underground Railroad conductor whose antislavery vision was grounded in Puritanism, declared that all the forces of civilization and nature stood in opposition to slavery.
Throughout the debates, Lincoln publicized his moral opposition to slavery in the most unequivocal terms. Two years earlier, at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, party leaders, while they voiced their strong opposition to slavery, had been wary of making moral pronouncements, perhaps in an effort to avoid sounding like incendiary Garrisonians. Robert Emmet, the president of the convention, declared, “We come to treat Slavery not as a moral question. . . . Slavery is, so far as our functions are concerned with it, a political evil; and we do not come here to discuss the great abstract principles of right and wrong, the laws of God and the behests of the Bible, Slavery be right or wrong.”56
Lincoln, in contrast, now equated the Republican Party with the law of justice and morality. His boldest statements came during the final debate, at Alton, where Owen Lovejoy’s Puritan-fired abolitionist brother had been murdered two decades earlier. Lincoln declared that there was a sharp difference in America between “one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery in this country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. It is the sentiment around which all their actions, all their arguments, circle, being a moral, social, and political wrong”—an echo of Lovejoy’s statement months earlier that slavery was “an evil, social, moral, and political—a wrong to the slave
Then Lincoln delivered a full-scale Lovejoyan declaration:
That is the real issue. . . . It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself . . . , whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.58
Lincoln here combined the major themes that antislavery advocates traced to Puritanism: self-rule versus the divine right of kings, absolute moral decisions, and the principles of liberty and equality. Right and wrong, Lincoln declared, have been rigidly distinguished from the beginning of time. They are a part of the natural order and the divine plan, as deeply entrenched as the difference between “the common right of humanity” and “the divine right of kings.”
No Forefathers’ Day orator could have expressed the idea more strongly than that.
There’s evidence that the public bought his argument. In the November elections, the Republican candidates for office, the most visible of whom was Lincoln, won 53 percent of the popular vote statewide, as opposed to 46 percent for Douglas and the Democrats. But Douglas won the election, because, at the time, the Illinois legislature chose the US senator. And the districts represented in the legislature were weighted to the Democrats.
Lincoln and his associates suspected foul play in the election results. Because of flexible voter registration laws, tampering with elections was commonplace, especially by manipulating the immigrant vote. Democrats, in particular, were known to “colonize” swing districts with Irish railroad workers who were rapidly naturalized so that they could vote. David Davis, who had high praise for Lincoln’s speeches in the Senate race, remarked, “There would be no doubt of Douglas’ defeat if it was not from the fact that he is colonizing Irish votes.”59 William Herndon, likewise, was confident that “there is nothing which can well defeat us but the elements, & the wandering roving robbing Irish, who have flooded over the State.”60
Lincoln, also suspicious of Democratic hijinks, was prepared to fight fire with fire. On October 20, five days after his last debate with Douglas, he wrote the Republican operative Norman Judd saying that while he felt confident about his chances in the election, he feared being “over-run with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual.” He said he had recently spotted fifteen Irishmen going around with bags (presumably containing money to be used to bribe voters). He wrote Judd: “I have a bare suggestion. When there is a known body of these voters, could not a true man, of the ‘detective’ class, be introduced among them in disguise, who could, at the nick of time, control their votes? Think this over. It would be a great thing, when this trick is attempted upon us, to have the saddle come up on the other horse.”61
It’s unclear what Lincoln expected this disguised agent to do to control votes, but he seemed ready to go to the limit to defeat Douglas and the Democrats.
As it turned out, he fell victim to the malapportionment of the Illinois legislature. Legislative seats still followed districting based on the 1850 census, before the population explosion that occurred in the northern, largely Republican portion of the state. And so, though Lincoln and the Republicans won the statewide popular vote, the legislature on January 5, 1859, elected Douglas to the Senate by a vote of 54 to 46.
Despite his stellar performance in the debates, Lincoln was left with the reality of the loss to Douglas. By one account, he had moments of depression. On the evening of Douglas’s victory, the lawyer Henry Whitney found Lincoln alone in his law office “gloomy as midnight, . . . brooding over his ill-fortune” and murmuring, “I expect everybody to desert me.’”62 But as usual, humor helped him deal with the loss. He told a journalist “that he felt like the Kentucky boy, who, after having his finger squeezed pretty badly, felt ‘too big to cry, and too badly hurt to laugh.’”63
He had lost a battle, but he had a better chance than before of succeeding in the long run. He had stood toe to toe with the most magnetic speaker of his day and had expressed the Republican Party’s positions on slavery with striking acuity and moral urgency. Talk of his running for president in 1860 began to circulate. When he told his friend Anson Henry that the Senate race “gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age,” even “though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten,” Henry assured him that the people “will bear you on their memories until the time comes for putting you in possession of their House in Washington.”64
It was not just his principled, logical defense of the Republican program people would remember; it was also his common touch, his genuine identification with the popular heart.
Even his demeanor radiated egalitarianism. We get a sense of what the forty-nine-year-old Lincoln was like in the fall of 1858 from a reminiscence by the Ohio journalist David Ross Locke, who interviewed him in Quincy, the venue of the sixth debate with Douglas. Locke would prove a significant figure for Lincoln during the White House years. Adopting the persona of Petroleum V. Nasby, a bigoted, loutish Copperhead, Locke wrote devastating satirical newspaper sketches and books that Lincoln read avidly and shared with others.
When Locke interviewed Lincoln in a Quincy hotel room, Lincoln took off his coat, tie, and shoes and tilted back on his chair, with one of his large feet perched on another chair. “I like to give my feet a chance to breathe,” he explained.65 Locke noted, “He seemed to dislike clothing, and in privacy wore as little of it as he could.” Lincoln’s face was in its default look—sad and abstracted—but it came alive when the talk turned to a recently deceased politician who had been an extremely vain man. Lincoln joked that if the man had known how many people would attend his funeral, “he would have died years ago.”
As a journalist and political humorist himself, Locke appreciated Lincoln’s ability to tell jokes that weren’t just exercises in random rib-tickling or pointless exaggeration, as was most of the era’s popular humor. Locke noted, “He said wonderfully witty things, but never from a desire to be witty. His wit was entirely illustrative. . . . He never cared how he made a point so that he made it, and he never told a story for the mere sake of telling a story. When he did it, it was for the purpose of illustrating and making clear a point.”66
This potent storytelling ability of Lincoln’s annoyed Douglas, who said, “Every one of his stories seems like a whack upon my back.”67
Locke found that Lincoln’s joke about the egotistical man who would have died years ago to attend his huge funeral fit the immediate context. When Locke saw Douglas speak at the Quincy debate the next day, he saw nothing but self-importance. Douglas was “so full of self that there was room for nothing else”; he championed conservative views just to get ahead.68
Lincoln had once warned that America could be taken over by a despotic leader who served himself, not the nation. Locke sensed that possibility when he saw the speech by Douglas, who “fed upon applause till he fancied himself a more than Caesar.”69 The scene was ominous: “He suppressed facts, twisted conclusions, and perverted history. He wriggled and turned and dodged; he appealed to prejudices; in short, it was evident that what he was laboring for was Douglas and nothing else.” For Lincoln, in contrast, “his personal interests did not weigh a particle. He was the representative of an idea, and in the vastness of the idea its advocate was completely swallowed up.” Lincoln was “absolutely honest—honest all the way through—and in face and manner satisfied all men that he was so.”
The little-big-man humor Lincoln had utilized for so long found a natural target in the pretentious, egotistical Douglas. Lincoln said that many who wanted the famous Douglas to be president “have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands,” whereas “in my poor, lean, lank, face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. [Tremendous cheering and laughter.]”70 Douglas’s constant insults and evasions led Lincoln to compare him to a cuttlefish, “a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes. [Roars of laughter.]” Popular sovereignty became so attenuated in Douglas’s contradictory explanations that it was “as thin as the homoeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” One of Douglas’s repeated stories about antislavery radicals was such “stale fraud” that it reminded Lincoln of “the fisherman’s wife, whose drowned husband was brought home with his body full of eels.” When asked what to do with the corpse, she replied, “Take the eels out and set him again.”
By the late 1850s, Lincoln was well positioned to unify the Republican Party as a political candidate with unique popular appeal. Not only did he transform politics, but he also stood poised to transform a key political base that Stephen Douglas had once controlled: Young America.
His success in corralling the enthusiasms and spirit of young Americans would sweep him into the presidency and into the early phase of the Civil War.
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