Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 8 Economy and Politics Part 2

 The conflict between Lincoln and Douglas is normally seen as one of warring political ideas. Douglas, indifferent about slavery, championed popular sovereignty, or the right of states carved out of western territories to decide for themselves about slavery; Lincoln, morally opposed to slavery, wanted to halt its expansion. This contrast, discussed endlessly by historians, speaks to the ideological distance between the two men. However, there were many politicians of the time who were at loggerheads over slavery. Why did the slavery debate crystallize in the memorable verbal showdown—at some moments close to an old-time rough-and-tumble fight—between the two politicians on the hustings in Illinois in 1858? And why did Douglas get under Lincoln’s skin to the degree that he did? In the mid-1850s, Lincoln wrote a note in which he compared himself to Douglas. He remarked that he had known Douglas for more than two decades, but “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.”¹⁸

Lincoln’s sense of insufficiency came from the political prominence Douglas had gained, largely by appealing to young voters. The Vermont-born Douglas had moved to Illinois in 1833 and met Lincoln there two years later while serving in the state legislature. He had little formal education and worked his way up as a lawyer, judge, and politician. He successfully ran for the US House of Representatives in 1843 and 1844 and then in 1846 for the Senate, where he served from 1847 until his death in 1861, making a big mark on the national scene. He helped push the Compromise of 1850 through Congress, and he authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the 1854 law that left future decisions on slavery to voters in newly admitted states.

Douglas’s national visibility partly explains Lincoln’s envy of his longtime rival. But there was another dimension to the competition: the battle for Young America. From 1840 onward, winning the youth vote was a chief aim of American politicians. In the years that followed, several political factions courted Young America—including nativists and supporters of the 1856 presidential candidate John Frémont—but no one did so over the long term with the effectiveness of Stephen Douglas. Five feet four, stocky, with a broad face and a determined look, Douglas earned his nickname “the Little Giant” by giving pugnacious speeches filled with slick reasoning and sensational invectives that appealed to young voters. By the early 1850s, he was, as a journalist noted, “the favorite son of Young America.”¹⁹

In the early going, Douglas had a step up on Lincoln in the battle for young voters because of his political loyalties. Originally, Young America emerged from the expansionist spirit of the Democratic Party, forcefully verbalized in the Democratic Review by its editor John L. O’Sullivan (who coined the phrase Manifest Destiny) and pushed by the Democratic president James K. Polk, the main force behind the Mexican War, which led to America’s acquisition of more than half a million square miles of territory, all the way to the Pacific. Douglas rode the wave of Young America’s enthusiasm for westward expansion.

The challenge of politicians was to channel the barely controllable energies of the young toward party loyalty. Rival political clubs often brawled. In 1844 the New York Herald reported that “it is notorious that the fighting men—the bullies—the ‘sporting men’—the ‘gentlemen of the fancy’—as they are called in their own slang” were “hired and paid by both parties, as the leaders and managers of these political clubs.” Armed with bowie knives and revolvers, these club leaders were “producing a state of affairs which now threaten us with riot, bloodshed, conflagration, and we know not what terrible disorders.”²⁰

In his autobiographical book A Boy’s Town, William Dean Howells re-created the youth culture of his native Ohio in the 1840s. From a young man’s perspective, Howells recalled, political campaigns were forms of mass entertainment. Each party had its popular campaign songs and rustic symbols, and young people, whether of voting age or not, went crazy with enthusiasm. Election days were filled with drinking, fights, yelling, and setting bonfires. Howells had especially vivid memories of boys hurling fireballs—turpentine-soaked rag balls that were lit, picked up gingerly, and thrown in high arcs that left trails of flame.²¹

It was important for politicians to exploit this frenzied enthusiasm because one’s virgin vote usually signaled one’s political future. Once committed to a party, the young voter, like a faithful partner in a monogamous marriage, typically stayed loyal to the party in subsequent elections.²² Although the Democrats had the populist heritage of Andrew Jackson to draw from (hickory poles, first used in 1828 to boost “Old Hickory” Jackson to the presidency, remained a staple for Democratic candidates in later races), the Whigs became skilled at concocting attractive folk myths and organizing on the ground-roots level.

The 1840 Whig campaign for William Henry Harrison was an effective charade. The Whigs turned what was intended by Democrats to be an insult—the jeering suggestion that Harrison should return to his log cabin and drink hard cider—into a badge of honor. No Harrison rally was complete without a log cabin—usually many log cabins, some small and toted about on wagons, others pictured on badges or flags, and yet others large structures covering hundreds of square feet. In some of the large cabins there was a plain-clad woman at a spinning wheel, a rifle-toting frontiersman at the front door, and outside, a canoe, a horned owl, and a chained raccoon—all reminders of the woods. As we know, image often trumps reality in political campaigns. In reality, Harrison, who was descended from Virginia’s ruling class, lived in a sixteen-room mansion in Ohio. He was a temperance advocate who didn’t touch liquor. But barrels of spiked cider were on hand at Whig rallies to add a giddy buzz to the homespun atmosphere. Attracting “grocery” voters (in a day when saloons were called groceries) was part of political strategy, as Lincoln recognized. In the midst of the Log Cabin campaign, he wrote a friend, “A great many of the grocery sort of Van Buren men, as formerly, are out for Harrison. Our Irish Blacksmith Gregory, is for Harrison. I believe I may say, that all our friends think the chance of carrying the state, verry [sic] good.”²³

Whigs piled on other popular symbols, too. To represent Harrison’s momentum, a large ball was rolled from town to town. Also, Harrison’s inglorious engagement with Native Americans at Tippecanoe River in 1811—he burned an Indian village to the ground after repulsing a surprise attack by the natives—was hailed as a victory on a level with Andrew Jackson’s at New Orleans. Thus was born “the hero of Tippecanoe,” who would march to victory with “Tyler too.”

March he did, to a structured rhythm. The Whigs proved adept in organizing.²⁴ Lincoln, as casual as he may have been in his law office, approached the Harrison campaign with militaristic discipline. In a pro-Harrison newspaper, the Old Soldier, he and his Whig cowriters insisted that Van Buren’s “double-drilled army” must be defeated. The writers recalled how in the War of 1812, American forces, “on learning that an organized foe was invading their land, they, too, organized—met—conquered—killed and drove the foe beyond the ‘world of waters.’” And so “We justify—we urge—organization on the score of necessity. A disbanded yeomanry cannot successfully meet an organized soldiery.” The Whigs addressed their readers: “Organization must again be had. We . . . will form the rank and file; you shall be the generals, and commanders-in-chief. Thus organized, we will meet, conquer and disperse Gen. Harrison’s and the country’s enemies, and place him in the chair, now disgraced by their effeminate and luxury-loving chief.”²⁵

Lincoln wrote a circular that gave precise directions to Whig organizers. “Captains” should be appointed on various levels—county, precinct, and section. Each captain must “pledge to perform promptly all duties assigned to him.” All these duties were designed to create a substantial Whig turnout at the polls. In an era before mass advertising and robocalls, this get-out-the-vote drive was intensely personal. The duty of the section captain, Lincoln wrote, was “to see each man of his Section face to face, and procure his pledge that he will for no consideration (impossibilities excepted) stay from the polls on the first monday in November; and that he will record his vote as early on the day as possible.”²⁶

What did it matter if voters cast their ballots early or late in the day? Lincoln evidently wanted to secure as many Whig votes before wildness and distraction took over. Young party operators plied voters with drink, coaxed them with entertainment, or foisted ballots on them (in those days, each party printed its own colored ballots and handed them out). As Jon Grinspan notes, “Young Americans spent their times buttonholing neighbors, manufacturing ballots, and intimidating voters in hidden locations where smart dealings verged on hidden tricks.”²⁷ Howells recalled the turbulence of election days in what he called “that barbarous republic of boys.” The Whigs yelled, “Democrats eat dead rats!”—answered by, “Whigs eat dead pigs!” Alcohol-fueled fights were a ritual. Howells recalled:

There were always fights on election-day between well-known Whig and Democratic champions, which the boys somehow felt were as entirely for their entertainment as the circuses. . . . The fighting must have come from the drinking, which began as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day and night with a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen.²⁸

Lincoln saw the crucial importance of winning over young male voters. As we’ve seen, he was not above fighting to gain control, as in his historic battle against Jack Armstrong, which jump-started his political career by winning over the Clary’s Grove Boys to his side, or his threats of physical reprisal against opponents in the state legislature. He continued to reach out to young men. Here Lincoln faced a special challenge because of his marriage to Mary Todd. In a decade when voters bought into populist symbols, Lincoln knew the price of being married to a woman who had lived among the wealthy on Springfield’s Aristocracy Hill. He wrote a friend in 1843, “It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens of your County, who twelve years ago knew me a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat—at ten dollars per month to learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and arristocratic [sic] family distinction. Yet so chiefly it was.”²⁹

He would later be wildly successful in overcoming any taint of aristocracy when he swept to victory as the Illinois Rail-splitter in 1860. But a pressing issue for him in the 1840s was how to woo the youth vote. He knew that the future for any politician was in the hands of young voters whose behavior could be erratic and whose energies must be guided. In the midst of campaigning for Zachary Taylor in 1848, he gave advice about attracting young voters in a letter from Washington to his Springfield law partner William Herndon:

Now as to the young men. You must not wait to be brought forward by the older men. For instance do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men. You young men get together and form a Rough & Ready club, and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in every body that you can get, Harrison Grimsley, Z. A. Enos, Lee Kimball, and C. W. Matheny will do well to begin the thing, but as you go along, gather up all the shrewd wild boys about town, whether just of age, or little under age—Chris Logan, Reddick Ridgely, Lewis Zwizler, and hundreds such. Let every one play the part he can play best—some speak, some sing, and all hollow. Your meetings will be of evenings; the older men, and the women will go to hear you; so that it will not only contribute to the election of “Old Zach” but will be an interesting pastime, and improving to the intellectual faculties of all engaged. Dont fail to do this.³⁰

Lincoln drives his point home emphatically—“Dont fail to do this”—because he sees the absolute necessity of directing the political loyalties of “hundreds” of Springfield’s young people in a Whig direction. Songs, speeches, any “interesting pastime,” as long as it is “all hollow” (presented with great energy), must be used to pull in young voters. The letter reveals his perception of Herndon as his connection to the young: “You young men get together and form a Rough & Ready club.” In other letters to Herndon, he referred to “you and others of my young friends at home” and advised, “Go it while you’re young!”³¹

Here, then, is another reason for Lincoln’s selection of Herndon, nine years his junior, as his third law partner—and, later, of Ward Hill Lamon, a decade younger than Herndon, as his political enforcer. They were hot-blooded, smart young men given to bouts of drinking and thus close in spirit to the “shrewd wild boys” Lincoln competed for.³² Lincoln knew that some of these youths could not yet vote, but “whether just of age, or little under age,” they were immensely valuable. They were either virgin voters or future ones, and Lincoln wanted to channel them toward his party.

TIPTOEING AROUND SLAVERY

In urging Herndon to form Rough and Ready clubs to attract the young, Lincoln revealed that at this point in his career he was interested more in preserving the unity of his party and his nation than he was in forcefully asserting his antislavery principles.

He saw that antislavery reform was riddled with divisions. In 1840, the New York–based followers of Lewis and Arthur Tappan broke off from William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston-centered American Anti-Slavery Society because of the latter’s advocacy of women’s rights and nonresistance. The Garrisonians, already on the fringe, became especially unpopular in the 1840s, when they advocated disunion (the separation of the North from the slaveholding South) and rejected churches and the government, both of which they regarded as corrupted by the South’s peculiar institution. Both groups had only tangential connections with Unitarian/transcendentalist antislavery figures such as Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

While Lincoln hated slavery as much as anyone, he was alarmed by divisions within the antislavery ranks. He came to dismiss Garrisonian abolitionists as “those who would shiver into fragments the union of the states; tear to tatters its now venerated Constitution; and even burn the last copy of the Bible, rather than slavery should continue a single hour.”³³ Moral persuasion, advocated by the Tappanites, or individual resistance, championed by transcendentalists like Thoreau, he considered inadequate to combat the Southern slave power.

He was ideologically in line with the Liberty Party and its successor, the Free Soil Party, which challenged slavery through political channels.³⁴ These parties’ goal of halting the westward spread of slavery later became the centerpiece of the Republican Party. In the 1840s, however, these nascent forms of antislavery politics struck him as well-intentioned but futile. He observed that in 1844 the Liberty Party unwittingly helped the spread of slavery because it swung the election from the antiextensionist Henry Clay to the expansionist James Polk. Had the Liberty Party not been in the picture, he noted, Clay almost certainly would have won New York and the White House, which would have given antislavery voters what they wanted: a president reluctant to wage war on Mexico in the interest of seizing western territories, where slavery could find root.³⁵ By the same token, in the 1848 race, Lincoln criticized the Free Soil Party as a sectional, one-idea party that jeopardized the chances of the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, whom Lincoln saw as an electable figure who as president would not stand in the way of the Wilmot Proviso, which called for barring slavery from the western territories.

The fact that he could support two slaveholders—Clay and Taylor—shows how far he would go in the interest of Whig Party unity. In his own political campaigns of the 1840s he appears to have largely avoided the highly contentious slavery issue. Having been defeated in the race for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly in 1832, he was elected to the Assembly four times: in 1834, 1836, 1838, and 1840. He became increasingly attentive to party unity. In the state races during the 1830s, the Whigs followed the system of multiple candidates running against one another. By the end of the decade, the Whigs had seen the need to put aside this system of competing candidates and adopt the convention system, whereby party members met and decided on a single candidate for a particular office. This was how the Democrats had chosen their presidential candidates ever since 1832 and their state candidates in Illinois since 1835.

The Whigs succeeded on the national level by holding their first convention in 1839, when they nominated Harrison for the presidency. Soon they outdid the Democrats in organizational strength. Lincoln attended the first Whig Party state convention on October 7, 1839. In 1840 he not only contributed to the programmatic Whig circular outlining various levels of officers to corral voters, but he was ready to put party loyalty above personal ambition. In March 1840 he wrote Stuart, “I do not think my prospects individually are very flattering, . . . But the party ticket will succeed triumphantly.”³⁶ As it turned out, he was elected to his fourth term in the General Assembly that August, even as he worked to advance the cause of William Henry Harrison. He promoted the distribution of the Harrison newspaper the Old Soldier and listed names of former Democrats who, in his words, “have come out for Harrison.” He also helped write a flyer instructing voters about the locations of local ballot boxes.

At times his party zeal seemed to overwhelm his antislavery views. Harrison’s opponent, Martin Van Buren, had, nineteen years earlier as a New York legislator, voted for suffrage for free, property-holding blacks. Lincoln, with an eye on discrediting Van Buren, denounced “the political course of Mr. Van Buren, and especially his course in the New York convention in allowing free Negroes the right of suffrage.” Lincoln got “spontaneous bursts of applause” and “convulsed the house with laughter” with his “highly amusing anecdotes,” leading to his concluding praise of “the civil and military reputation of the hero of Tippecanoe.”³⁷

Lincoln’s disparagement of black suffrage here is reprehensible but unsurprising, given the ban against African American political participation in most states in 1840, when he made these remarks. His racial attitudes would evolve, and he became the first American president who called openly for the vote for African Americans. Actually, it was the Democrats who were most given to public race-baiting. Stephen Douglas’s speeches often became racist rants, and in his 1858 debates against Lincoln he aligned white supremacy with the nation and its founders. The N-word was commonly used by Democrats who wanted to tar their opponents with advocacy of abolitionism and amalgamation (miscegenation). Democrats branded even a conservative Whig like William Henry Harrison—the descendant of slaveholders who had once tried to open the way for slavery in both Indiana and Ohio—as a dangerous abolitionist who would bring about an appalling racial reversal as president. Harrison was an “Abolitionist of the first water,” the Democrats charged, who would “make slaves of White men” while making “free men of black slaves.”³⁸ The Democrats’ views came through in a satirical poem, “Jim Brown—The Politician,” whose black speaker, a Whig loyalist, boasts that when Harrison becomes president, he will win a congressional seat and will marry a white woman. “I am a good Whig nigger,” he announces, “and my name is Jim Brown.” He says he