A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 13
The Eternal Struggle Between These Two Principles
1858

I SHALL HAVE MY HANDS FULL. HE IS THE STRONG MAN OF THE PARTY—FULL OF WIT, FACTS, DATES, AND THE BEST STUMP-SPEAKER WITH HIS DROLL WAYS AND DRY JOKES, IN THE WEST HE IS AS HONEST AS HE IS SHREWD.
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN
June 1858

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. I HOLD THAT HE IS AS MUCH ENTITLED TO THESE AS THE WHITE MAN.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The first debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858

HE CHEERS FOR LINCOLN’S HOUSE DIVIDED SPEECH HAD BARELY died down when the criticism started up. To many, whether friend or foe, Lincoln’s words had sounded like the language of abolitionism. His biblical metaphor seemed to be a prophecy of civil war. Lincoln found himself on the defensive before the campaign had even begun.
His friends were concerned. Leonard Swett, his close friend from the Eighth Judicial Circuit, believed Lincoln had defeated himself with the first ten lines of the speech. John Locke Scripps, the editor of the Chicago Democratic Press, while joining in the widespread praise of the speech, wrote Lincoln to warn that “some of my Kentucky friends who want to be Republicans” objected to the “House Divided” metaphor. “This they hold is an implied pledge on behalf of the Republican party to make war upon the institution in the States where it now exists.”
Lincoln thanked Scripps for his support, “and yet I am mortified that any part of it should be construed so differently from any thing intended by me.” Lincoln explained that his language did not assert the power of the federal government “to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists.” He told Scripps that whenever the effort to spread slavery into the territories “shall be fairly headed off,” by whatever means, then it will be on its way to “ultimate extinction”—what the founders had presumed would happen when they formed the nation.
STEPHEN DOUGLAS LEARNED of Lincoln’s speech just as the Thirty-fifth Congress was adjourning in Washington. Douglas confided to John W. Forney, the editor of the Philadelphia Press, “I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of the party—full of wit, facts, dates, and the best stump-speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him, my victory will be hardly won.”
When Douglas returned to Chicago in early July 1858, cheering crowds greeted his arrival at the Great Central Depot aboard a special four-car train. Douglas heard artillery boom a 150-gun salute and saw welcome banners hanging from windows as he rode in an open carriage to the Tremont House. To many, he remained the leader of Illinois politics.
On the evening of July 9, 1858, Douglas opened his Senate campaign with a speech from the Tremont House’s balcony. Lincoln, at Douglas’s invitation, sat in a chair behind the senior senator. Douglas’s speech revealed the themes he would emphasize in the coming campaign. At the outset, he underlined “that great principle of self-government to which my life for many years past has been, and in the future will be devoted.” Douglas took credit for the victory over the Lecompton Constitution, but immediately pointed out that his opposition had nothing to do with the issue of slavery. Douglas’s speeches always combined defense and offense. He defended the Dred Scott decision, arguing that Republican criticism of the ruling failed to understand that “this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.”
With his challenger present, Douglas complimented Lincoln, saying he was a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent.” But then he returned to offense. Focusing on the “House Divided” speech, Douglas declared, “It is no answer … to say that slavery is an evil and hence should not be tolerated. You must allow the people to decide for themselves whether it is a good or an evil.” He warned that Lincoln was calling for “a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free states against the slave states.” Douglas hoped that his strong offense would put Lincoln on the defense.


Stephen Douglas, “the Little Giant” all of five feet four inches, would travel more than five thousand miles in his campaign and debates against Lincoln.

The next evening, Lincoln answered Douglas from the same balcony. He began in the self-deprecating manner that endeared him to audiences. He told the crowd that he would read from Douglas’s speech, “provided I can find it,” as he struggled to bring out a rumpled copy of the Chicago Press and Tribune from his coat pocket. He quoted Douglas’s story about how the Russians at the battle of Sebastopol (1854–55) had not stopped to inquire who their fusillade of bullets would hit, and Douglas said neither would he. Lincoln responded, “Well now, gentlemen, is not that very alarming?” which drew loud laughter from the crowd. “Just to think of it! Right at the outset of his canvass, I, a poor, kind, amiable, intelligent [laughter] gentleman [laughter and renewed cheers] I am to be slain in this way. Why, my friend, the Judge, is not only, as it turns out, not a dead lion, nor even a living one—he is the rugged Russian Bear!” The crowd responded with “roars of laughter and loud applause.”
Lincoln devoted the first part of his speech to defending his position, talking about popular sovereignty and the Lecompton Constitution. He addressed Douglas’s criticism that Lincoln was in favor of war between North and South. “I did not say that I was in favor of anything. … I only said what I expected would take place. I made a prediction only—it may have been a foolish one perhaps.” Lincoln became quite personal in explaining his lifelong opposition to slavery. “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the Nebraska Bill began.”
In concluding, Lincoln lifted up the Declaration of Independence as the standard we might never reach perfectly, but to which we should nevertheless strive. He made his point by offering another biblical analogy. “My friend has said to me that I am a poor hand to quote Scripture.” Lincoln was sensitive to the criticism that because he was not a member of any church he was not entitled to use the Bible. “I will try it again, however.” Lincoln appealed to “one of the admonitions of the Lord, ‘As your Father in Heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect.’ ” Lincoln declared, “The Savior” had set up a standard of perfection but did not expect any human beings to reach it. Just so, the Declaration of Independence set a standard, “all men are created equal. … I say … let it be as nearly reached as we can.”
THE CAMPAIGN FOR the U.S. Senate was off and running. Lincoln stayed in Chicago to consult with his advisers before heading home to Springfield. Within days, Douglas traveled south from Chicago like a conquering hero. He rode in a special car complete with flags and a banner that read “Stephen A. Douglas, the Champion of Popular Sovereignty.” At a stop in Joliet, a twelve-pound cannon on a special flatcar was attached to the train. As the train approached each small town, two young men in semi-military dress fired the cannon to announce Doug las’s arrival. He arrived with his vivacious second wife, Adele. At only twenty-three, she was twenty-two years younger than her husband and offered a lively contrast to the often dour Douglas. She was a hit on the campaign trail, with both the ladies and the men.
On July 16, 1858, Lincoln traveled from Springfield to Bloomington to hear Douglas speak. When Douglas finished, loud calls went up for Lincoln to reply. He came to the front and received “three rousing cheers” from the crowd. Lincoln declined to speak, saying, “This meeting was called by the friends of Judge Douglas, and it would be improper for me to address it.”
All interest now focused on Springfield. As the Douglas train neared the state capital, the cannon began firing every minute. This time, Doug las spoke in the afternoon and Lincoln in the evening. Douglas covered much of the same ground as in his Chicago and Bloomington speeches. He sought to distance himself from Lincoln’s assertion that he was an instrument in the extension of slavery. He first complimented and then condemned Lincoln. He is “a kind-hearted, amiable, good-natured gentleman … and there is no objection to him, except the monstrous revolutionary doctrines with which he is identified and which he conscientiously entertains.”
When Lincoln addressed a large crowd that evening, he spoke at length about how popular sovereignty had been nullified by the Dred Scott decision. He charged Douglas with “having been a party to that conspiracy and to that deception for the sole purpose of nationalizing slavery.” In affirming the Declaration of Independence, he challenged Douglas that if he did not believe that all men are created equal, to come forward with an amendment: “Let them make it read that all men are created equal except negroes.”
Up to this point Lincoln had decided, with the encouragement of his advisers, that as the challenger it would be a good idea to follow Doug las from place to place and attempt to speak after him. But the shadowing annoyed Douglas and his followers. The Chicago Times charged that Lincoln could not draw crowds on his own. Before long, some of Lincoln’s advisers began to question this strategy. They believed it put Lincoln on the defensive, and usually ended up attracting only a portion of the crowd that first heard Douglas. By the end of July, Lincoln had stopped trailing after Douglas and wrote a series of letters to friends in different communities explaining his change of tactics. “I should be at your town to-day with Judge Douglas, had he not strongly intimated in his letter, which you have seen in the newspapers, that my presence, on the days or evenings of his meetings would be considered an intrusion.” Lincoln did not want to back away from challenging Douglas directly, but he needed to find a way to do so on a more equal footing.
Six weeks into the campaign, Lincoln and his advisers came up with the idea that would change the whole shape and tenor of the contest. They offered Douglas the opportunity for an extended series of debates, envisioning upward of fifty.
Lincoln was taking a risk. Douglas, with much more experience as a legislator than Lincoln, had built a reputation in the Senate as an outstanding debater. Some of Lincoln’s friends feared the Little Giant would run roughshod over their man.
These fears notwithstanding, Lincoln wrote a formal challenge to Douglas on July 24, 1858. “Will it be agreeable to you to make an arrangement for you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvass?” As the incumbent, Douglas feared he had little to gain. He was also concerned that a third candidate, a Buchanan Democrat, might yet enter the field. But in the American West, a man could be labeled a coward if he refused a challenge.
Cornered, Douglas countered. He agreed to debate Lincoln, but not all over the state. Douglas proposed to limit the debates to seven, which would take place in seven of the nine congressional districts. There was no need for debates in Chicago and Springfield, where the candidates had spoken already. Douglas insisted on deciding the details of the debates. On July 29, 1858, on the way to speaking engagements, Lincoln and Douglas met outside the little town of Bement to hammer out final particulars. Douglas named the places and dates to fit his schedule. Two days later, after a week of negotiations, Lincoln wrote from Springfield, “I accede, and thus close the arrangement.” Just as the corn was growing tall under the warm summer sun on the Illinois prairies, the campaign between Lincoln and Douglas was suddenly about to grow into the kind of historic event neither man could have imagined.


This map of Illinois shows the places of the seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas in the late summer and fall of 1858.

IN THE 1850S, in rural and small towns across Illinois, politics and religion were often the main shows in town. The preachers held forth on Sunday. The visiting lecturers spoke on cold winter evenings. Towns vied with one another to host the annual summer county fairs. Visiting circuses were anticipated by people of all ages. With frequent elections, politics provided year-round drama, entertainment, and sources for gossip. The seven Lincoln-Douglas debates became the Fourth of July picnic, summer revival meeting, county fair, visiting circus, and visiting lecturer all rolled into one grand pageant.
People came from miles around, arriving early and staying late. Hotels overflowed with guests, with visitors sleeping on cots in halls and parlors, or on pews in churches, or on the streets on warm summer evenings. The debates became dramatic theater featuring two actors on stage who could not have been more different in height, looks, and political philosophies. The enthusiastic audiences were often larger than the towns where the debates were held.
A reporter for the New York Post captured the intense interest in politics mirrored in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. “It is astonishing how deep an interest in politics this people take. Over long weary miles of hot and dusty prairie the processions of eager partisans come—on foot, on horseback, in wagons drawn by horses or mules; men, women, and children, old and young.”
People poured into Ottawa, in north central Illinois, for the first debate. The green town of Ottawa, population seven thousand, was located at the confluence of the Fox and Illinois rivers. Ten years earlier, in 1848, it also became a canal town astride the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the final canal built in the United States and the last link between the eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico. Ottawa, part of the Third Congressional District, was represented by abolitionist Owen Lovejoy. A hotbed of abolitionism, with both water and rail connections, it had also become a stop on the Underground Railroad.
By the day of the debate, Saturday, August 21, 1858, between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand people converged on Ottawa’s Lafayette Square at the center of town. Special trains brought spectators from Chicago. With no chairs provided, people prepared to stand for hours under the scorching sun. To make matters worse, the New York Evening Post reported that from sunrise to high noon “Ottawa was deluged in dust.” Patriotism was unfurled everywhere in the bright colors of flags, banners, and bunting. A cannon was fired at irregular intervals, punctuating the already noisy atmosphere.
Lincoln arrived at noon aboard a special Chicago and Rock Island seventeen-car train packed with his supporters. A vast crowd greeted him at the depot, from which he was taken by a carriage decorated with evergreens to the home of Mayor Joseph O. Glover to rest until the debate. Douglas made his grand entrance into Ottawa in a carriage drawn by four white horses.
Shortly after two o’clock, already behind schedule because of the crush of people, the dignitaries made their way to the speakers’ stand, where representatives of the press and timekeepers jostled for space to witness and monitor the event. Lincoln and Douglas took the center seats, flanked by Congressman Lovejoy, Mayor Glover, and Chief Shab-bona, elderly leader of the Ottawa Tribe. By the rules of the debates, the first participant would speak for one hour, followed by a response of one and a half hours, with the first speaker given a final half hour for a rebuttal. Douglas would have the advantage of beginning and concluding four of the seven debates, including the first one. The crowds felt free to cheer, jeer, and offer questions and comments.
After an opening recapitulation of his leadership in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas spent the majority of his first hour attacking Lincoln’s speeches and actions since 1854. Douglas, recognizing that he needed to climb a steep hill in a strongly Republican district, determined not to defend his record, but rather to force Lincoln to defend his.
He accused Lincoln and Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull of entering into an arrangement to dissolve the Whig and Democratic parties and “to connect the members of both into an Abolition party under the name and disguise of a Republican party.” Douglas focused his attack on the early Republican meeting convened by Lovejoy in Springfield in October 1854. The week before the Ottawa debate, Douglas had written to his friend Charles H. Lamphier, editor of the Illinois State Register in Springfield, seeking details about the platform enacted at that meeting. Douglas, in a dramatic gesture, held up the resolutions of the meeting of the “Black Republicans.” He declared that his purpose in reading the resolutions was to ask Lincoln seven questions to see “whether he will stand by each article in that creed and carry it out.” At that point a voice in the crowd called out, “Hit him again.” Douglas resumed, “I ask Abraham Lincoln to answer these questions, in order that when I trot him down to lower Egypt [the extreme southern part of Illinois] I may put the same questions to him again. … My purposes are the same everywhere.”
Douglas assured the audience that, knowing Lincoln for twenty-five years, “I mean nothing personally disrespectful or unkind to that gentleman.” He proceeded to offer flattering remarks about Lincoln’s life and career, but salted each remark with satire. He described Lincoln as a “flourishing grocery-keeper” in New Salem—translation: Lincoln sold liquor. He offered mock praise for Lincoln as a congressman who “distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country.” Finally, Douglas read the introduction of the “House Divided” speech. Even as the audience responded with “good,” Douglas declared Lincoln’s words were “revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this government.”
Douglas was also adept at turning national issues into local problems. Thus, he attacked Lincoln on his criticism of the Dred Scott decision by asking the audience “Are you in favor of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges of citizenship?” (“No, no!”) “Do you desire to strike out of our State Constitution that clause which keeps slaves and free negroes out of the State, and allow the free negroes to flow in and cover your prairies with black settlements?” (“Never!”) Douglas assailed Lincoln by playing up to the prejudices and fears of his audience. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, [laughter], but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.”
After an hour, Lincoln rose to offer his response. The crowd cheered so loudly and long that it was several minutes before he could begin. As he began to speak, he held in his hand a book containing Douglas speeches, editorials from newspapers, and several quotations he intended to use, including some from the founding fathers.
Henry Villard, a twenty-three-year-old German immigrant hired to cover the debates for the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, captured the unusual characteristics of Lincoln as a speaker. “He had a lean, lank, indescribably gawky figure, an odd-featured, wrinkled, inexpressive, and altogether uncomely face.” As for his mannerisms, “He used singularly awkward, almost absurd, up-and-down and side-wise movements of his body to give emphasis to his arguments.” And yet, observed Villard, in Lincoln one saw “a thoroughly earnest and truthful man, inspired by sound convictions.” A reporter for the New York Evening Post wrote, “I must confess that long Abe’s appearance is not comely. But stir him up and the fire of his genius plays on every feature. … You have before you a man of rare power and magnetic influence.” Whereas Douglas had been pretentious, often demeaning, and sometimes angry, Lincoln appeared comfortable, self-deprecating, and often humorous in his remarks.


Lincoln kept a scrapbook filled with Douglas speeches, newspaper editorials, and quotations from the founding fathers as a ready resource to use during the debates.

Lincoln, in response to Douglas’s attacks, replied, “When a man hears himself misrepresented, it provokes him—at least, I find it so with myself; but when the misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.” As the crowd laughed, Lincoln began his defense. One by one, he refuted Douglas’s accusations in a style that delighted the crowd. After rebutting each charge—for example, that he agreed to “sell out the old Whig party”—Lincoln would end by saying, “Yet I have no doubt he is conscientious about it,” satirizing the very word that Douglas had used to characterize him. Finally, Lincoln dismissed Douglas’s attacks about the supposed first Republican platform in 1854 by turning to “my friend Mr. Lovejoy,” who was seated on the platform. “He will be able to recollect that he tried to get me into it, but I would not go in.”
Douglas used his final half hour to resume his offensive. He charged that Lincoln had not answered his questions. After he finished, supporters swarmed the stage and lifted a startled and embarrassed Lincoln to their shoulders.
The highly political press reported two different debates at Ottawa. The Chicago Press & Tribune’s headline crowed: “Twelve Thousand Persons Present: The Dred Scott Champion Pulverized.” The Chicago Times, by contrast, emblazoned: “Lincoln’s Heart Fails Him! Lincoln’s Legs Fail Him! Lincoln’s Tongue Fails Him.” The reader, searching for the truth between such politically biased reporting, might wish to turn to the text of the debate. Reporter Horace White and stenographer Robert R. Hitt covered the debates for the pro-Lincoln Chicago Press & Tribune, while Henry Binmore and James B. Sheridan, two shorthand reporters, wrote on the debates for the pro-Douglas Chicago Times. The difficulty was that the texts in the two newspapers sometimes varied on crucial words or phrases.
The rival campaign staffs attempted to use the debate postmortem to influence public opinion. Lincoln’s closest friends sent their congratulations. Judge David Davis wrote, “Everybody here is delighted with the rencontre at Ottawa.” Richard Yates, on whose behalf Lincoln delivered his first speech when he reentered politics in 1854, applauded, “We were well satisfied with you at Ottawa.” As for Lincoln, the day after the Ottawa debate, he wrote Joseph O. Cunningham, editor of the Urbana Union, “Douglas and I, for the first time this canvass, crossed swords here yesterday; the fire flew some, and I am glad to know I am yet alive.”
Behind closed doors, however, Lincoln and his advisers were not so pleased with his performance. Henry C. Whitney, his friend from the Eighth Judicial Circuit, dispirited, wrote that even Lincoln’s friends said “Dug had now got you where he wanted you—that you had dodged on the platform.” Lincoln went to Chicago to meet with his advisers. Norman Judd, chairman of the Republican state central committee, and Joseph Medill and Charles Ray of the Chicago Press & Tribune gave him strong medicine. “Don’t act on the defensive at all.” Lincoln and his strategists worked on questions he could ask Douglas. Ray implored Congressman Elihu Washburne, in whose congressional district the next debate would be held, “When you see Abe at Freeport, for God’s sake tell him to ‘Charge Chester! Charge!’ ” Medill, speaking of Douglas, added, “You are dealing with a bold, brazen, lying rascal and you must ‘fight the devil with fire.’ ” Finally, Lincoln was urged by his friends, “For once leave modesty aside.”
THE SECOND DEBATE took place six days later in Freeport, on the banks of the Pecatonica River, a few miles south of the Wisconsin line. In spite of overcast skies and the threat of rain, upward of fifteen thousand people converged on this town of seven thousand. More than a thousand traveled the six-hour train ride from Chicago. Although not as antislavery as Ottawa, Freeport sat at the hub of a strongly Republican area.
Lincoln arrived by special train the morning of the debate and was escorted to the new, stylish Brewster House. In the early afternoon, he traveled the short distance from the hotel to the debate site in a broad-wheeled Conestoga wagon accompanied by a group of farmers. There he met Douglas. The attire of the debaters was a study in contrasts. Douglas was dressed in a ruffled shirt, a dark blue coat with shining buttons, light trousers, well-shined shoes, and a white brim hat. Lincoln wore a stovepipe hat, a coat with too-short sleeves, and baggy trousers so short they showed off his rough Conestoga boots. Lincoln and Doug las partisans held aloft a variety of competing banners, including “All Men Are Created Equal” and “No Nigger Equality.”
Lincoln, speaking for the first hour, immediately struck a more confident tone in this second debate. At the end of the Ottawa debate, Doug las had accused Lincoln of answering only one of his seven “interrogatories.” At Freeport, Lincoln wasted no time in answering all seven, doing so in crisp one-sentence answers, which he later expanded upon. He did not support the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. “I shall be exceedingly glad to see slavery abolished in the District of Columbia.” Although direct, his answers contained no new revelations.
At Freeport, Lincoln became the hunter and Douglas the hunted. Lincoln took the offensive by asking Douglas four questions, the second being the most critical. “Q. 2. Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?”
Lincoln’s advisers, especially Joseph Medill, had encouraged him to ask this question. It was meant to push Douglas to speak about the meaning of popular sovereignty within the new legal landscape of the Dred Scott decision. Certainly this was not a new question for Douglas. “Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer [it] a hundred times from every stump in Illinois.” Yet Lincoln, who would return to popular sovereignty again and again in the debates, decided to make him answer it at Freeport. Douglas came into the debates trying to straddle the fence between popular sovereignty and Dred Scott. Lincoln believed the Supreme Court’s decision had effectively put a roadblock in front of popular sovereignty. He held that if Douglas endorsed the Supreme Court decision, he could not at the same time support self-government. Lincoln hoped his question would force Douglas off the fence.
Lincoln then turned his focus to the Republican meeting of October 1854, which Douglas had pounced on in the first debate. Lincoln admitted that six days earlier he had not known whether the resolutions Doug las read from had actually been passed at the Springfield meeting. His own recent research, done by Herndon, had revealed several important facts.
The meeting did not call itself the Republican State Convention.
No resolutions were passed in Springfield.
The resolutions Douglas read from had been passed later at a meeting in Kane County.
Lincoln was at neither meeting.
Lincoln spelled out his case as if he were a lawyer in a courtroom, turning to the jury of the Freeport audience and exclaiming, “It is most extraordinary that he should so far forget all the suggestions of justice to an adversary, or of prudence to himself, as to venture upon the assertion of that which the slightest investigation would have shown him to be wholly false.” Prosecutor Lincoln rested his case to a response of tumultuous cheers.
Douglas was forced to begin his one-and-a-half-hour reply responding to Lincoln’s four questions. His answer to question two was direct. “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a territory under the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please.” Why? “Slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations.”
Douglas’s answer to Lincoln, while not new, received widespread attention in the press, who quickly dubbed it the “Freeport Doctrine.” Douglas may have been seeking to separate himself from the Buchanan Democrats in Illinois, but his answer further alienated him from the pro-slavery Democrats in the South.
Whenever cornered, Douglas resorted not to ideas, but to aggression. A good defense, he believed, was a good offense. His favorite tactic was to characterize Lincoln as part of the “Black Republicans.” He used the term “Black Republicans” thirteen times at Ottawa and eighteen times at Freeport. He also referred to Lincoln’s ideas by using the terms “abolition” and “abolitionizing.”
After answering Lincoln’s four questions, Douglas suggested Lincoln needed more help from his advisers if he was to craft more questions. He named among Lincoln’s advisers Frederick Douglass, the well-known African-American writer and editor, abolitionist, and Republican. He began his race-baiting by acknowledging that some people in Freeport “think that Fred. Douglas is a good man.” He then told a story that he said took place the last time he was in Freeport. “I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, whilst Fred. Douglas and her mother reclined inside.” The story provoked a flurry of responses—“Right,” “What have you to say against it?” “What of it?”—to which he replied, “All I have to say of it is this, that if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to be on social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, while you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.” He concluded, “Those of you who believe that the negro is your equal and ought to be on an equality with you socially, politically, and legally; have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.”
Douglas was a master of negation. If momentarily caught off guard by Lincoln’s charges about the supposed Springfield resolutions of October 1854, he quickly recovered and tried to change the subject by going on the attack. He said that the real import of the resolutions was their radical abolitionist content, not whether they had been approved “on the right ‘spot.’ ” Douglas then launched into a diatribe about Lincoln’s unpatriotic behavior for criticizing the Mexican War during his term in Congress.
Lincoln had the opportunity for a rebuttal for the first time at Freeport. He failed to follow up on his questions to Douglas and spent most of the time defending his own record.
Most of Lincoln’s supporters believed he did a much better job at Freeport. He had seized the initiative with his four questions. He was less repetitive than Douglas. Yet, there was still concern in the Lincoln camp. Medill, who had encouraged Lincoln to ask the hard-hitting second question, was more discouraged than encouraged. The day after the debate, Medill wrote that Douglas was better on the stump than Lincoln and “the popular sympathy is more on his side than Lincolns.”
FREDERICK DOUGLASS WAS NOT one of Lincoln’s advisers, but he cautiously admired Lincoln from a distance. Born in 1818, nine years after Lincoln, Douglass grew up as a slave near the Tuckahoe River and Baltimore, Maryland. He never knew his father, a white man, and was separated from his mother when he was very young. After what he described as “a religious awakening” at thirteen, his passion for reading found its focus in the Bible. In 1838, Douglass escaped from slavery by traveling in disguise on a train from Baltimore to Philadelphia. Settling as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass joined the abolitionist movement led by William Lloyd Garrison. In 1847, Douglass broke with Garrison, embracing the tactics of political action and rejecting Garrison’s reliance on moral suasion. Moving to Rochester, New York, Douglass began publishing his own abolitionist journal, the North Star. By the 1850s, Douglass had become the leading African-American spokesman in America, attacking slavery and advocating a greater role in society for free blacks in the North.
Speaking in Poughkeepsie, New York, Douglass told an audience commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies that “the contest going on just now in the State of Illinois is worthy of attention.” He observed that “Slavery and Anti-Slavery are at the bottom of the contest” and characterized Stephen Douglas as “one of the most restless, ambitious, boldest and unscrupulous enemies with whom the cause of the colored man has had to contend.” He then turned, briefly, to “the great speech of Mr. Lincoln,” quoting the introduction to the “House Divided” speech, commending it as “well and wisely said.”
THE DEBATES WERE ONLY a small part of the campaign in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln, by his own count, delivered sixty-three speeches; Stephen Douglas said he delivered more than one hundred. In the nearly three weeks between Freeport and the next debate at Jones-boro, Lincoln gave eight speeches, plus responses at several conventions and rallies. Although he focused his campaign on the middle of the state, he traveled the length of Illinois.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been physically impossible before the late 1850s. During his Senate campaign, Lincoln traveled 3,400 miles by train, 600 miles by carriage, and 350 miles by boat, for a total of 4,350 miles. Douglas traveled 5,277 miles, mostly by special train, with his own car, which allowed him to rest between towns and spend time with his wife, Adele. Lincoln traveled as a passenger on regular trains, without Mary, who stayed home with the boys. Exuberant supporters often accompanied him, giving Lincoln little time for rest.
For the third debate, Lincoln went down into “Little Egypt,” a narrow neck of land at the convergence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, wedged between Kentucky and Missouri, with its best-known town named Cairo. The region was rural, poor, and strongly Democratic. It was also known for its hatred of blacks. Jonesboro, with its eight hundred residents, lay three hundred miles south of Chicago, and farther south than Richmond, Virginia.
This was not Lincoln land. In his twenty-five years in politics, Lincoln had not spent much time in the state’s southernmost counties. John C. Frémont had received only forty-six votes in Union County, in which Jonesboro was located, in the 1856 presidential election.
For Lincoln, a man who reveled in discoveries and inventions, a thrilling part of his stay in Jonesboro occurred in the sky the night before the debate. On September 14, 1858, he sat on the Union House’s porch to watch Donati’s Comet and its fiery tail race past the earth. Italian Giovanni Battista Donati, who discovered the comet on June 2, 1858, calculated that the comet, one of the brightest to be observed in the nineteenth century, would not be visible again for two thousand years.
The next morning, on a hot and humid day, 1,200 to 1,500 people came to Jonesboro. Some spectators made the trek from Kentucky and Missouri. Douglas arrived with his private cannon.
The setting for the debate was simple, the platform constructed of rough planks placed across logs. A table in the center of the platform gave newspaper reporters a place to write. The seats for Lincoln and Douglas and the various dignitaries were ordinary chairs brought from nearby homes.
Douglas knew his challenge in this southern region of Illinois was not from the Republicans, but from that faction of the Democratic Party loyal to President Buchanan. He needed to reassure these conservative Democrats, given his rejection of the Lecompton Constitution, of his party orthodoxy. He did so by attacking Lincoln on his “House Divided” speech, trying to show that Lincoln was not a moderate but actually a collaborator with radical abolitionists.
Lincoln, speaking second, added an additional question to the four he had asked at Freeport: “If the slaveholding citizens of a United States Territory should need and demand Congressional legislation for the protection of their slave property in such territory, would you, as a member of Congress, vote for or against such legislation?”
Douglas responded with a general answer that “it is a fundamental article of the Democratic party creed that there should be noninterference by Congress in the States and territories.”
Toward the end of his presentation at Jonesboro, knowing he could not win over a hostile audience by argument, Lincoln reached out to them with identification. “Did the Judge talk of trotting me down to Egypt to scare me to death? Why, I know this people better than he does. I was raised just a little east of here. I am a part of this people. But the Judge was raised further north, and perhaps has some horrid idea of what this people might be induced to do.”
At Jonesboro, Lincoln tried not to become defensive. For the most part, he succeeded in parrying the thrusts of his Democratic antagonist.
THREE DAYS LATER, Charleston welcomed Lincoln as a favorite son with an eighty-foot pictorial banner hung across the main street with the caption: “Abe’s Entrance Into Charleston Thirty Years Ago.” The painting depicted Lincoln, the pioneer boy, driving three yoke of oxen as his family entered Illinois from Indiana. The Douglas contingent answered with their own banner with the caption, “Negro Equality,” showing a white man, a Negro woman, and a mulatto boy.
The fourth debate would take place in Coles County in east central Illinois, an old-line Whig district that Lincoln knew well. Some in the crowd had known his father and stepmother, who had settled in Coles County in 1831. Thomas Lincoln had died in 1851, but his beloved stepmother, Sally Bush Johnston Lincoln, still lived in an old log cabin south of Charleston. She did not attend the debate.
Both Lincoln and Douglas entered Charleston on the morning of September 18, 1858, like heroes at the head of elaborate processions with bands and banners. In the Lincoln procession was Bowling Green College’s marching band, which had traveled fifty miles from Terre Haute, Indiana, to march for their Indiana son. Prominent in the procession was a large wagon filled with thirty-two young women wearing white dresses with long red and blue sashes, each holding a banner for one of the thirty-two states in the Union. A banner above the wagon read:
Westward thy Star of Empire takes it way,
Thy Girls Link-on to Lincoln,—
Their Mothers were for Clay.
Following the wagon was a young woman on horseback with a sign bearing the motto “Kansas will be free!”
In this rural district of cornfields, when the time for early morning farm chores was over, between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand spectators thronged the dusty roads of Charleston. Men, women, and children from Bloody Hutton, Dogtown, Paradise, Muddy, and Goosenest Prairie converged on the agricultural society fairgrounds west of the town. A special eleven-car train brought in spectators from Indiana. By ten o’clock, the streets leading to the public square were nearly impassable.
At 2:45, Lincoln opened the debate with an introduction that would become the subject of much interpretation and misinterpretation. At his hotel that morning, he said, an elderly gentleman had wanted to know whether “I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people.” After the laughter died down, Lincoln said he had not intended to say much on this subject in Charleston, but thought he would devote five minutes to the question.
He then issued a series of statements defining where he stood on racial equality. “I will say that 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, [applause],—that 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.” After stating his own opinion, Lincoln went on to say that he had never met a person “in favor of producing a perfect equality, social, and political, between negroes and white men.”
Lincoln, by the fourth debate, had grown tired of Douglas’s continual race-baiting. He decided to take on Douglas’s constant criticisms by clarifying his own position and appealing to the generally held norms of the community where he was speaking. Furthermore, Lincoln appealed to the laws of the state of Illinois, which expressly forbade marriage between whites and blacks.
“Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known.” So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America in 1833. Few white Americans were without aversion to black Americans in the 1840s and 1850s. White attitudes were based on an assumption of the inferiority of African-Americans. This prejudiced mind-set permeated both the South and the North.
Although the first Illinois constitution in 1818 outlawed slavery, by the time of a revised constitution, anti-black feeling was on the rise. A proposal at the 1847 Illinois constitutional convention to extend the right of suffrage to blacks was defeated by a vote of 137 to 7. Article 14 of the revised constitution of 1848 directed the general assembly to enact laws prohibiting black migration to Illinois. More than three-fourths of Illinois voters approved the new constitution.
Ironically, antislavery and racist attitudes walked hand in hand. Only a few aggressive abolitionists contemplated social equality with African-Americans as a possibility. Republicans who campaigned in the 1850s understood that it was prudent to deny any interest in social equality as part of achieving some measure of political rights for African-Americans.
Lincoln had one more method to try to silence Douglas’s “great apprehension.” It was his favorite tactic. Whereas Douglas resorted to anger, Lincoln employed humor. Lincoln said he understood that laws against social equality rightly belonged to the states and that Douglas seemed to be “in constant horror” about measures that might be brought forward in the state legislature to promote equality of the races. What was Lincoln’s solution? “I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure.”
Norman Judd had written to Lincoln before the debate at Charleston, “Allow me to suggest that in your next joint debate where you have the opening you make your entire opening a series of charges against Douglas leaving all statement of your own views for your reply.” Lincoln followed Judd’s advice. Taking leave of the remarks about popular sovereignty and Dred Scott that had been so prominent in the first three debates, Lincoln instead focused on the accusation that Douglas, despite his protest of the Lecompton Constitution, was part of a conspiracy to impress slavery on Kansas. Senator Lyman Trumbull, who had returned to Illinois in August to campaign against Douglas, had first made this charge, based on his knowledge of Douglas’s insider trading in the Senate. Douglas had denounced the charges before, but Lincoln renewed them at Charleston in an at-times wearying recitation of Trumbull’s version of the story.
When Douglas stepped forward to speak, he expressed astonishment. “I am amazed that Mr. Lincoln should now come forward and endorse that charge, occupying his whole hour in reading Mr. Trumbull’s speech in support of it.” In Douglas’s conclusion, he referred to Lincoln’s opening remarks about Negro equality and left his audience questioning whether Lincoln was in favor of Negro citizenship.
The fourth debate did little to boost Lincoln. His opening remarks about equality were read and heard in quite different ways among different audiences. Some thought he was simply acknowledging the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of those in south central Illinois. Others, reading about the debate in Chicago and northern Illinois, wondered if this was the same Lincoln of the “House Divided” speech. Many observers, then and now, reading only two sentences and not the full two paragraphs, failed to understand that Lincoln’s purpose in raising the issue of social equality was to get Douglas off his back. It was a short-term political tactic.
—

LINCOLN SPENT THE NEXT DAY with relatives in Coles County. He visited with his stepmother, giving her fifty dollars before he left the next morning at four o’clock to resume his campaigning. In the nineteen days before the next debate in Galesburg, Lincoln would crisscross the state in a hurly-burly schedule of speech making, sometimes two or three times in a day.
Lincoln continued to refine his thinking on slavery by writing on his steady supply of small slips of paper. The catalyst for one of his notes was reading Slavery Ordained by God, an 1857 book by Frederick A. Ross, a Presbyterian minister from Huntsville, Alabama. The book, based on lectures and sermons, became an instant bestseller among pro-slavery advocates. Ross argued that slavery was a beneficent and ordering institution.
Lincoln began his musing with a question: “Suppose it is true, that the negro is inferior to the white, in the gifts of nature?” He understood that most white Americans accepted the assumption of inferiority, but he did not stop there. Pondering that supposition, Lincoln wrote, “Is it not the exact reverse justice that the white should, for that reason, take from the negro, any part of the little which has been given him?” Lincoln offered his answer. “Give to him that is needy” is the Christian rule of charity; but “Take from him that is needy” is the rule of slavery.
Ross had argued that slavery was the will of God, to which Lincoln wrote, “Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases.” He then proposed a case. Dr. Ross has a slave named Sambo. Lincoln asked, “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” Lincoln pondered the options. “The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation—the Bible—gives none—or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning.” Lincoln quickly added, “No one thinks of asking Sambo’s opinion of it.” Lincoln wrote that the last option was for Dr. Ross to decide. If he decided that Sambo was to remain a slave, “he thereby retains his own comfortable position.” If “he decides that God wills Sambo to be free,” it will mean that he “has to walk out of the shade, throw off his gloves, and delve for his own bread.” Lincoln asked whether Ross will be guided by “that perfect impartiality” which was the best means of making decisions. Lincoln anticipated Ross’s answer: “But, slavery is good for some people!!!” and rebutted that slavery is “peculiar” in “that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.”
This complex reflection on slavery was something Lincoln was not yet prepared to say in public. After carefully considering all the options, Lincoln’s anger boiled over in the conclusion of his note. “Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!” The triple exclamation points revealed Lincoln’s deep feeling as he struggled with the immorality of slavery, especially as it was defended by religious leaders. Lincoln was ever alert to the mishandling of religion.
In a second note, written in this same period, Lincoln began, “But there is a larger issue than the mere question of whether the spread of negro slavery shall or shall not be prohibited by Congress.” Lincoln asserted that even the Buchanan papers, such as the Richmond Enquirer and the New York Day-Book, understood the issue. Both newspapers pointed to the assertion by Senator John Pettit of Indiana that the doctrine of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “a self-evident lie.” As for Senator Douglas, Lincoln said he “regularly argues against the doctrine of the equality of men.” Lincoln concluded that the “common object” of Douglas and his allies was to subvert the clear avowal in the Declaration of Independence and “to assert the natural, moral, and religious right of one class to enslave another.”
THE LARGEST CROWD of the seven debates converged on Knox College in Galesburg in northern Illinois on Thursday, October 7, 1858. Gales-burg, a town of 5,500, was Republican, antislavery, and a stop on the Underground Railroad. Heavy rains had fallen the day before, and on debate day icy winds tore down signs and ripped up banners. But not even the elements could keep 15,000 to 20,000 spectators away. An eleven-car train came from Chicago. A twenty-two-car train from Peo-ria, crammed full with 2,200 passengers, was slowed by mechanical problems and did not arrive until near the end of the debate. Despite the winds, numerous banners vied with one another for creativity. A representation of a two-donkey act showed Douglas attempting to ride Popular Sovereignty and Dred Scott. Try as he might, he was unable to keep his balance and was sent sprawling. Another banner was inscribed “Small-fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln,” a refutation of the recent Southern charge that laborers in the North were at least as exploited as slaves in the South.
At 2:30, Lincoln and Douglas were driven to the college in identical carriages. Because of the bitter conditions, the platform had been moved from an open space on the college campus to abut the east side of Old Main, the central building on campus. According to a later reminiscence, both Lincoln and Douglas had to climb through a window in Old Main to get to the platform. Lincoln, never at a loss for words, was heard to say, “Well, at last I have gone through college.”
Douglas began and quickly settled into his regular speech. By this fifth debate Douglas appeared exhausted, with a hoarse voice that did not carry his words beyond the first few rows of the audience. He defended popular sovereignty and attacked both Republicans and Buchanan Democrats. He accused Lincoln of shifting his message according to the geography of the debate. “In the extreme northern part of the state he can proclaim as bold and radical abolitionism as ever Gid-dings, Lovejoy, or Garrison enunciated.” In the southern part of the state, Douglas claimed Lincoln identified himself as “an old line Whig, a disciple of Henry Clay.” Douglas summed up his criticism by telling the crowd, “Mr. Lincoln’s creed cannot travel.”
Lincoln, by contrast, seemed restored at Galesburg. His nineteen days of travel, spent speaking with thousands of people in Urbana, Jacksonville, Winchester, Pittsfield, Metamora, and Pekin, had not tired but rather renewed his spirits. Lincoln, who could be introspective and took pleasure from time alone to read and to write, was energized by contact with all sorts of people on the campaign trail.
Taking heart from this strongly Republican community, Lincoln began with the Declaration of Independence. Douglas had insisted that the Declaration’s opening words were never intended to include Negroes. Lincoln countered with his strongest statement in the debates about the Declaration’s intent. “I believe that the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” As for Douglas’s contention that Jefferson did not intend to include Negroes because he was the owner of slaves, Lincoln replied by recalling Jefferson’s words, offered late in his life, that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just.” Lincoln elicited “great applause” when he thundered, “I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.”
Lincoln also charged head-on into Douglas’s criticism that Lincoln changed his message on Negro equality depending on where he was speaking. Lincoln pointed out that all his speeches were in print so everyone could read them. He denied that there was any conflict between what he said at the various debates. Lincoln then turned Doug las’s criticism to his advantage by addressing the moral dimension of the debate about slavery. In summarizing Douglas’s position, Lincoln reminded the audience that “every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is any wrong in Slavery.”
Lincoln’s supporters were exuberant about his performance at Gales-burg. The Quincy Whig reported, “When Douglas concluded, ‘Old Abe’ mounted to the stand, and was received with three such tremendous cheers.” The Republican paper believed “he met, and successfully refuted, every argument made by Judge Douglas.” Lincoln did so by seizing the moral high ground. He charged Douglas with “blowing out the moral lights around us.” Lincoln declared, “Judge Douglas, and whoever like him teaches that the negro has no share, humble though it may be, in the Declaration of Independence, and so far as in him lies, [muzzles] the cannon that thunders its annual joyous return” every Fourth of July.
THE SIXTH DEBATE took place on October 13, 1858, at Quincy. Nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River, just across from Missouri, Quincy was settled by New Englanders who named the town in 1825 for then president John Quincy Adams. Quincy was like many cities in central Illinois—contested territory between Republicans and Democrats. Boats from Hannibal, Missouri, and Keokuk, Iowa, swelled the crowd to between ten thousand and fifteen thousand who gathered at Washington Park on a sunny but cool day.
Lincoln arrived by train in the morning and was invited to ride in a decorated carriage, although he said he preferred to “foot it to Browning’s,” his friend Orville Browning’s home, where he would rest until the debate. Nevertheless, a large procession guided Lincoln. Central in the procession was a model ship on wheels drawn by four horses and labeled “Constitution.”
Carl Schurz, an immigrant who had fled the failed revolution in Germany of 1848–49, traveled from Watertown, Wisconsin, to witness the debate. Later, Schurz recalled that Lincoln’s
charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal to the ear or to the eye. His voice was not melodious; rather shrill and piercing, especially when it rose to its high treble in moments of great animation. His figure was unhandsome, and the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward. He commanded none of the outwardly graces or oratory as they are commonly understood. His charm was of a different kind. It flowed from the rare depth and genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings.
He said that Lincoln’s “voice was not musical, being rather high-keyed and apt to turn into a shrill treble in moments of excitement.” But it did possess “an exceedingly penetrating, far-reaching quality.” Lincoln’s movements especially struck Schurz. “His gestures were awkward. He swung his long arms sometimes in a very ungraceful manner. Now and then, to give particular emphasis to a point, he would bend his knees and body with a sudden downward jerk and then shoot up again with a vehemence that raised him to his tiptoes and made him look taller than he was.”


Carl Schurz, a German immigrant from Wisconsin, traveled to Quincy to hear Lincoln in the sixth debate. Schurz would become instrumental in mobilizing the large German population in the Midwest behind Lincoln.

Lincoln began the debate by denying that his remarks about Negro civil rights at Charleston were any different from what he had said at Ottawa or would affirm at Quincy. Whenever Lincoln bowed to the norms of his day as to the impossibility of social equality between the races, he always concluded with the greater possibility, not yet fully realized, inherent in the Declaration of Independence: “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 other man.” To this the crowd cheered loudly.
Lincoln concluded his opening hour with a compelling repetition of his charge that slavery is morally wrong. “When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Lincoln stated that the issue was not whether he or Douglas was right or wrong, but whether slavery was right or wrong. If, Lincoln declared in his final sentence, “we can get all these men who believe that slavery is in some of these respects wrong, to stand and act with us in treating it as a wrong—then, and not till then, I think we will in some way come to an end of this slavery agitation.”
Douglas, on the defensive, was forced to respond to Lincoln’s charge that he would not say whether slavery was right or wrong. “I tell you why I will not do it. I hold that under the Constitution of the United States, each state of this Union has a right to do as it please on the subject of slavery.” He then spent much of his time disputing that he was conspiring with Pierce, Buchanan, and Taney to open the territories to slavery. Near the conclusion of his remarks Douglas stated, “This republic can exist forever divided into free and slave States.”
Lincoln, in his rebuttal, immediately seized upon Douglas’s remark. “We are getting a little nearer the true issue of this controversy, and I am profoundly grateful for this one sentence.” Lincoln said that he had no desire to argue with slavery in Kentucky or Virginia, but that Douglas would be happy to see slavery extend not just into the Western territories but into the Northern states.
AFTER THE QUINCY DEBATE, both Lincoln and Douglas boarded the City of Louisiana for the 115-mile passage down the Mississippi River to Alton, site of the final debate. Alton was snuggled among bluffs at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. When the ship arrived the next morning, Mary and fifteen-year-old Robert were waiting to greet Lincoln. They had traveled from Springfield on the Sangamon-Alton Railroad, which ran a half-price excursion fare to the debate. Robert, a member of the Springfield Cadets, was smartly dressed in a blue coat with white pants. Gustave Koerner, who had served as president of the Republican convention that nominated Lincoln for the Senate, had also traveled to Alton. Koerner found Lincoln in the sitting room at the Franklin House. Lincoln encouraged Koerner to go upstairs and speak with Mary because “she is rather dispirited” about her husband’s political chances. Koerner expressed his confidence to her “of carrying the State and tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”
In 1837, Alton had been the scene of the murder of Presbyterian abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, who was defending his press from a pro-slavery mob. In 1858, this town in southwestern Illinois remained sympathetic to slavery, Douglas, and Democrats. The White Cloud and Baltimore steamboats offered one-dollar round-trip fares from neighboring St. Louis, bringing in from Missouri more Douglas supporters. Some visitors even made the trip from Kentucky. On a beautiful fall day, organizers of the final debate were disappointed that the crowd would number only between five thousand and six thousand, some spectators saying that by now everyone knew what both Lincoln and Douglas would say.
Douglas began the debate looking like a man the worse for wear from the debates and the campaign. His voice could barely be heard as he summarized his arguments of the previous six debates. On the offense in debate one, by debate seven he made the odd decision to focus his defense on his decisions relating to Lecompton. Obviously distressed by Lincoln’s renewed emphasis on the Declaration of Independence at Galesburg and Quincy, Douglas, in a barely audible voice, declared, “I hold 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.”
Lincoln, in contrast, appeared tanned and eager for the final debate. Always conscious of his audience, Lincoln acknowledged that the citizens of Alton were linked with “strong sympathies by birth, education, and otherwise, with the South.” Not content to concede any audience, however, Lincoln recalled his father’s decision to move from a slave state to a free state, and then asked: “How many Democrats are there about here who have left slave states and come into the free state of Illinois to get rid of the institution of slavery?” One voice interrupted and said, “A thousand.” Another added, “One thousand and one,” to which Lincoln responded, “I reckon there are a thousand and one.”
Douglas, at Quincy and again now at Alton in Madison County, had tried to put on the mantle of Henry Clay, arguing that the architect of the Compromise of 1850 would never have acceded to Lincoln’s radical views. But no one loved Clay and his speeches more than Lincoln. Perturbed that Douglas tried to pass himself off as a follower of Clay, Lincoln reached into his coat and pulled out his notebook filled with extracts from important speeches. He read a long section from one of Clay’s speeches to show that the Great Compromiser believed in the great “fundamental principle” from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, even as Clay understood that principle had not yet become fully realized in American society.
Toward the end of this final debate, when Lincoln must have been tired, he rose to the height of his eloquence. Focusing his final comments on Douglas’s constant refrain that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or down, Lincoln responded that the real issue was the morality of slavery. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.” Lincoln declared the issue to be “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.” He continued,
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. It is the same spirit that says: “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”
THE TWENTY ONE HOURS of debate were over. The story of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 needs to be understood on its own terms and not from a backward glance from future events, when Douglas became at best a foil and at worst caricatured or marginalized. At the time of the debates, Douglas was a leading national actor while Lincoln was regarded solely as an Illinois politician.
How was the voter to decide? Most attended only one debate. At the outset, Lincoln had to discredit the idea that he was a radical abolitionist, whereas Douglas had to deny that he was a pro-Southern defender of slavery. There were many other issues that Lincoln and Douglas might have included in their debates—currency policy, tariffs, immigration, railroads—but the focus was almost exclusively on slavery. The debaters and the audiences agreed that this was the most important issue facing the nation.
There was a great deal of repetition in the debates, often with each debater reading long quotations from previous speeches. Douglas stuck to his theme of self-government. Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence again and again. Douglas began strong and put Lincoln on the defensive with his attacks and questions. Lincoln gathered momentum in the final three debates, beginning at Galesburg, both in his physical presence and his decision to focus on the moral dimension of slavery. Douglas, when under stress, resorted to anger and sarcasm. Lincoln, when pushed, reflexively responded with humor, a lighter touch that created a bond of trust with audiences. Lincoln, whether in his private notes to himself or in his public debates with Douglas, grew in his ability to communicate his ideas both clearly and forcefully.
The debates were over, but the campaign continued. Lincoln, after spending several days in Springfield, was off again. In the final two and a half weeks he was alternately discouraged and encouraged, as were his closest advisers. Stepping off the train in Naples on October 18, 1858, Lincoln saw fifteen “Celtic gentlemen” and wondered if these Irishmen were being brought into Illinois to vote. The next day, he heard that four hundred Irish laborers were arriving in Schuyler County to work on the railroad, arriving just before Election Day. On October 20, Lincoln wrote to Norman Judd, “I now have a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed, if we are not over-run with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual.”
A few days later, Judge David Davis expressed his apprehension. “Outside Republicans from the East, Mr. Greeley—Truman Smith &c have thrown cold water on the election of Lincoln.” A difficult blow to Lincoln’s chances for election came at the end of the campaign. A letter written by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky on August 1, 1858, announcing his support for Douglas, was held until the last week of the campaign when it could do the most damage. Lincoln and Crittenden had served together in the Thirtieth Congress. Crittenden viewed himself as Clay’s political heir. Astonished and hurt that a Kentucky Whig would enter the Senate campaign against an Illinois Whig, Lincoln had written Crittenden in July telling him that a story was being whispered “that you are anxious for the reelection of Mr. Douglas.” Lincoln told Crittenden, “I do not believe the story, but still it gives me some uneasiness. I do not believe you would so express yourself. It is not in character with you as I have always estimated you.” Unfortunately for Lincoln, the story proved to be true. Crittenden admired Douglas’s stand against the Lecompton Constitution and believed that a vote for Douglas was a vote against the Buchanan administration. Crittenden’s support for Douglas, trumpeted by the Illinois State Register in Springfield, certainly served to undercut Lincoln with some old-line Whigs, especially in the critical counties of central Illinois.
Lincoln chose to give his last speech of the campaign in Springfield on Saturday, October 30, 1858. An enthusiastic crowd of five thousand made it almost impossible for Lincoln to be heard. He became quite personal and emotional in his final words before friends and admirers. “Ambition has been ascribed to me,” Lincoln acknowledged.
I claim no insensibility to political honors; but today could the Missouri restriction be restored, and the whole slavery question replaced on the old ground of “toleration” by necessity where it exists, with unyielding hostility to the spread of it, on principle, I would, in consideration, gladly agree, that Judge Douglas should never be out, and I never in, an office, so long as we both or either, live.
He had ended on the high road of principle.
LINCOLN VOTED EARLY in Springfield on Election Day, Tuesday, November 2, 1858. A cold rain covered the Illinois prairies and fell “incessantly” throughout the day in the state capital, turning the streets into a “horrid condition.” The Illinois State Journal reported that “Street fights are not as numerous as expected,” but by sundown, the “city prison is nearly full.”
Republican candidates for the state legislature won the popular vote, 125,430 to 121,609. But Democrats won the contest for seats in the legislature by a vote of 54 to 46. Lincoln lost a split decision. It would be the legislators who would vote on January 5, 1859, and thus decide who would be the next U.S. senator. This Senate election, with its appeal to the people rather than to state legislators, was a first step on the long road toward the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, which would call for the direct election of senators.
After monitoring the results far into the night at the telegraph office, Lincoln headed wearily for home. Some years later he recalled that on that dark and rainy evening he slipped, “but I recovered … and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’ ”
IN A POSTELECTION INQUEST on their defeat, Republicans complained about the inequities of an antiquated apportionment of various Illinois legislative districts. William Herndon wrote a long letter to Theodore Parker, a New England transcendentalist minister, detailing what he deemed were “the causes of our defeat.” He blamed Horace Greeley: “His silence was his opposition;” he chastised Crittenden: “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden;” and he blamed the pro-slavery men who “went to a man for Douglas.” Finally, Herndon blamed “thousands of roving, robbing, bloated, pock-marked Catholic Irish” imported from St. Louis and other cities.
Lincoln did not blame anyone. If there was one person he might have blamed, it was Crittenden. The Kentucky senator wrote Lincoln on October 27, 1858, stating that the publication in several Democratic newspapers of a private letter stating why he was supporting Douglas was “unauthorized.” Crittenden’s letter, in the confusion of the election, had been picked up at the post office but, Lincoln said, “was handed me only this moment.” Everyone around him was blaming Crittenden but, Lincoln wrote, “It never occurred to me to cast any blame upon you.” In a final sentence, Lincoln expressed magnanimity in defeat. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me, but even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything dishonorable.” Lincoln’s magnanimity grew in part from his ability to attribute the best motives to those who were his opponents.
The Chicago Press & Tribune, under the editorship of Joseph Medill and Charles Ray, said it best on November 10, 1858, five days after Election Day.
Mr. Lincoln is beaten. We know of no better time than the present to congratulate him on the memorable and brilliant canvass he has made. He has created for himself a national reputation that is both envied and deserved; and though he should hereafter fill no official station, he has done the cause of Truth and Justice what will always entitle him to the gratitude of his party and the keen admiration of all who respect the high moral qualities, and the keen, comprehensive and sound intellectual gifts he has displayed.
On November, 19, 1858, Lincoln wrote Dr. Anson Henry, his former doctor and Whig associate, now living in Oregon. He told his old friend, “I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way, and though I sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.”


Mathew Brady took this photograph of a beardless Lincoln, in New York to deliver his Cooper Union address. It was later called “the photograph that made Lincoln president.”