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.”
SO 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.”
The amiable tone was laced with innuendo as Douglas described Lincoln’s climb from “flourishing grocery-keeper” (meaning that Lincoln sold liquor, a curious charge from the notoriously hard-drinking Douglas) to the state legislature, where they had served together in 1836, till Lincoln was “submerged…for some years,” turning up again in Congress, where he “in the Senate…was glad to welcome my old friend,” for he had neither friends nor companions. “He distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found that the i
ndignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends. He came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or Black Republican platform, in company with Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase, and Fred Douglass for the Republican party to stand upon.” With this, the crowd broke into laughter, shouting: “Hit him again.”
Lincoln readily conceded that Douglas was far better known than he. As he outlined the advantages of Douglas’s stature, however, his audience laughed with glee. “All the anxious politicians of his party,” Lincoln told a crowd at Springfield, “have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, 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.” When the cheers and laughter drawn forth by this comical image subsided, Lincoln went on, “Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle, alone.”
Douglas asserted that Lincoln dare not repeat his antislavery principles in the southern counties of Illinois. “The very notice that I was going to take him down to Egypt made him tremble in the knees so that he had to be carried from the platform. He laid up seven days, and in the meantime held a consultation with his political physicians.” Lincoln promptly responded, “Well, I know that sickness altogether furnishes a subject for philosophical contemplation, and I have been treating it in that way, and I have really come to the conclusion (for I can reconcile it no other way), that the Judge is crazy.” There was “not a word of truth” to the claim that he had ever had to be carried prostrate from a platform, although he had been hoisted aloft by enthusiastic supporters. “I don’t know how to meet that sort of thing. I don’t want to call him a liar, yet, if I come square up to the truth, I do not know what else it is.” Amid cheers and laughter, Lincoln closed: “I suppose my time is nearly out, and if it is not, I will give up and let the Judge set my knees to trembling—if he can.”
Throughout the debates, Lincoln carried a small notebook that contained clippings relevant to the questions of the day sent to him by his law partner, William Herndon, along with the opening lines of his own “House Divided” speech and the paragraph of the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was on the meaning of the Declaration that battle lines were drawn.
As Lincoln repeatedly said in many forums, slavery was a violation of the Declaration’s “majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe,” allowed by the founders because it was already among us, but placed by them in the course of ultimate extinction. Although unfulfilled in the present, the Declaration’s promise of equality was “a beacon to guide” not only “the whole race of man then living” but “their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.”
For Douglas, the crux of the controversy was the right of self-government, the principle that the people in each territory and each state should decide for themselves whether to introduce or exclude slavery. “I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the negroes in Christendom.”
Lincoln agreed that “the doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and eternally right,” but argued that “it has no just application” to slavery. “When the white man governs himself,” he asserted, “that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
While it did not matter to Douglas what the people of Kansas decided, so long as they had the right to decide, for Lincoln, the substance of the decision was crucial. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties on the leading issue of this contest,” declared Lincoln, “is, that the former consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not consider it either a moral, social or political wrong; and the action of each…is squared to meet these views.”
DOUGLAS UNDERSTOOD from the outset that his primary goal, more important than debating or defining his own position, was to cast Lincoln as a radical, bent on abolishing all distinctions between the races. The question of black equality—in the modern sense—was not controversial in Illinois, or in the nation as a whole. Almost every white man was against it, even most abolitionists. Douglas was certain that no candidate who professed a belief in the social or political equality of blacks and whites could possibly carry Illinois, where a long-standing set of Black Laws prevented blacks from voting, holding political office, giving testimony against whites, and sitting on juries.
At every forum, therefore, Douglas missed no opportunity to portray Lincoln as a Negro-loving agitator bent on debasing white society. “If you desire negro citizenship,” Douglas baited his audience, “if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.” The crowd responded as Douglas hoped: “Never, never.” Cheers nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted his opinion that “the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men…. I hold that this government was established…for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others.” Cries of “that’s the truth” erupted from the agitated throng amid raucous applause.
In response, Lincoln avowed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” He had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.” He acknowledged “a physical difference between the two” that would “probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” But “notwithstanding all this,” he said, taking direct aim at the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence…. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowment. But in 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.”
It is instructive, political philosopher Harry Jaffa perceptively notes, that the only unequivocal statement of white supremacy Lincoln ever made was as to “color”—the assertion of an obvious difference. Had he advocated political and social equality for blacks, he unquestionably would have lost the election in a state where the legislature not only supported the discriminatory Black Laws but had gone even further by passing a special law making it a criminal offense to bring into the boundaries of Illinois “a person having in him one-fourth negro blood, whether free or slave.” And this same law essentially barred blacks and mulattos from entering the state to take up residence.
Nonetheless, Lincoln’s implied support for the Black Laws stands in contrast to the bolder positions adopted by both Seward and Chase. Chase had long since adopted a liberal stance on race far in advance of the general public, and had been instrumental in removing some but not a
ll of Ohio’s discriminatory Black Laws. Seward, too, had spoken out vehemently against the Black Laws, and in favor of black suffrage, coming from the more progressive state of New York.
However, neither Seward nor Chase advocated full social and political equality for blacks. “Seward did not believe,” his biographer concludes, “that the black man in America was the equal of the white, or that he was capable of assimilation as were the Irish and German immigrants. But he did believe that the Negro was a man, and as such deserved and should have all the privileges of the whites.” Nor did Salmon Chase think that “the two races could live together.” He told Frederick Douglass that he thought “separation was in everyone’s best interests.” He believed that blacks would find “happier homes in other lands.” So long as they were here, however, he championed measures to fight discrimination.