CHAPTER 11
From this time forward, until the Senatorial question shall be decided, [Illinois is] the most interesting political battleground in the Union.
—NEW YORK TIMES
Lincoln ~ Buchanan
The Illinois Republican Convention met on June 16, 1858, to nominate Abraham Lincoln as “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate.” The Republicans hoped that by a direct appeal to the voters they could win the legislature and thereby the Senate seat.
The result was no surprise; ninety-five county conventions throughout the state had resolved that Lincoln would be the candidate, instructing their delegates to the state meeting accordingly. At the end of the convention, Lincoln stood to deliver remarks to 578 delegates and fifteen hundred spectators at the State Capitol. “We are now far into the fifth year,” he said, “since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation,” he said. “Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new—north as well as south.”
Lincoln went on to condemn Dred Scott, Kansas-Nebraska, and Lecompton, and to argue that before long the Supreme Court would rule that no state could exclude slavery from its limits. “Welcome or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown . . . To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. . . .Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy.
“Did we brave all then, to falter now?—now—when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail—if we stand firm, we shall not fail.”
Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, his opponent for the open Senate seat, had met in the Illinois legislature twenty-four years earlier. “We were both young then,” Lincoln remembered, “he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he.” Douglas never knew his father—a Vermont physician—who died while reportedly holding his infant son in his arms. Financial pressures forced Douglas as a young man to head west. “When shall we expect you to come home to us, my son?” his mother asked. “On my way to Congress, Mother,” he wrote at age twenty. Eventually he found himself in Illinois, where the doors of opportunity opened wide for him. Douglas was elected district attorney, state legislator, and was Van Buren’s appointee as the head of the Illinois Land Office by age twenty-four. After a narrow loss for Congress to Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner, Douglas was appointed a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. A congressman by age thirty, Douglas was sworn into the US Senate at thirty-three. In the 1852 Democratic Convention, the thirty-nine-year-old Douglas had demonstrated considerable strength, posting strong second-place showings to James Buchanan across many ballots until both were trampled by the dark horse, Franklin Pierce. A leader of great renown in the Senate, his association with Kansas-Nebraska held him back in 1856, but he was the presumed front-runner for president in 1860. This formidable resume contrasted sharply with that of his opponent in 1858.
On the eve of his Republican Party nomination for Senate, Lincoln had written a biography for a man compiling the personal data of everyone who had ever served in Congress. It read as follows:
Born, February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.
Education, defective.
Profession, a lawyer.
Have been a captain of volunteers in Black Hawk war.
Postmaster at a very small office.
Four times a member of the Illinois legislature, and was a member of the lower house of Congress.
Of Douglas, Lincoln could not help but observe, “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands.” Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln’s friend, recalled, “Mr. Douglas’s great success in obtaining place and distinction was a standing offense to Mr. Lincoln’s self-love and individual ambition. He was intensely jealous of him.”
Lincoln and Douglas would begin making their cases for the Senate seat in the face of challenges from their own parties. In Lincoln’s case, many Republican voices (though mostly out of state) called for giving Douglas a pass on Kansas-Nebraska and rewarding his redemptive work against Lecompton. Douglas, for his part, was beset by a vengeful administration, who busily purged the senator’s stalwarts from top patronage jobs in Illinois.
Douglas far from underestimated Lincoln. “I shall have my hands full,” he wrote. “He is the strong man of his 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.”
The state Republican Party urged Lincoln to challenge Douglas to debates, rejecting his current strategy of following Douglas throughout the state and speaking after him as a pathetic ploy. On July 24, Lincoln wrote to Douglas, “Will it be agreeable to you and myself to divide time, and address the same audiences during the present canvass?”
Douglas, like incumbents before and after him, recognized that he had little to gain by sharing a stage with his challenger. Still, after initially laughing off the invitation, he ultimately accepted, proposing debates in the seven congressional districts where neither candidate had yet spoken.
Reporters from out of state came to Illinois to cover the Senate race between Lincoln and Douglas, their accounts widely reprinted throughout the country. Ten thousand people attended the first debate in Ottawa.
Each debate featured much of the same points and counterpoints as those before it. Douglas accused Lincoln of being an abolitionist; chastised him for “taking the side of the common enemy against his own country” by opposing the war in Mexico; and sharply disagreed with his claim that Americans could not live divided between slave and free, as they had always done. Lincoln disclaimed any purpose of interfering with slavery where it existed, and any desire to create civil equality between blacks and whites, but he did not deny the humanity of blacks, as Douglas had done. And Lincoln argued that all men were entitled to the promises of the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Lincoln also took note that not all whites had equal abilities, but that the inferior among them were not made slaves. Lincoln dismissed popular sovereignty, in the wake of Dred Scott, saying that all it did was allow people who wanted slavery to approve it, and prevent people who did not want it from disapproving it.
Lincoln was much more sure-footed in the second debate at Freeport than he had been in Ottawa. He posed a series of questions to Douglas, one of which was designed to separate him from his Democratic base. Could a territory outlaw slavery before statehood? Douglas argued that it could, simply by not enacting a slave code, since slavery needed the positive support of the government to survive. Lincoln knew the answer Douglas would offer, but also knew that it ran counter to Dred Scott’s plurality opinion, as well as the position of many Democrats.
These debates, between a national star and his eloquent challenger, captivated the nation, extensively covering as they did the greatest issues of the moment. In his final words at the last debate in Alton, Lincoln placed the debates in their historical context. “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Turnout in Illinois was high on November 2, 1858. For the legislature, there were more votes for Lincoln Republicans than Douglas Democrats, and Republicans won both statewide offices. But Douglas would keep his Senate seat. From the 1856 election there were thirteen state senators who were not up for re-election until 1860; eight of them were Democrats. The legislators who won in 1858 did so under maps drawn on the 1850 Census, before massive population gains in the northern part of the state. And so the Republicans, with 50 percent of the popular vote, carried 47 percent of the legislative seats, and the Democrats, with 47 percent of the vote, won 53 percent.
Douglas had emerged from the battle unbroken. He had withstood the best efforts of his opponents in Illinois and Washington to unseat him, while the entire North was a killing field for Democrats. Most Democrats who were still standing were pro-Douglas and anti-Lecompton. Buchanan’s own Keystone State was no exception. “Well!,” he wrote his niece, “We have met the enemy in Pennsylvania and we are theirs.” Of twenty-five representatives elected in the state, only two supported Lecompton. Buchanan’s own floor leader in the House had lost his seat. In Ohio, the delegation would be eighteen Republicans to four Democrats, three of whom were Douglasites; in Indiana, seven Republicans to two Douglas Democrats, with two for the administration; New Jersey, three Republicans and two anti-Lecompton Democrats. New York Republicans and anti-Lecompton Democrats took twenty-nine of thirty-three seats. The states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, which had eluded Fremont, were clearly in play for the right Republican presidential nominee.
Lincoln, having exhausted his personal resources in his senatorial campaign, was back on the legal circuit. His ambition had been checked once more, despite his having done everything possible to win, and it hurt him deeply. He wrote a number of letters, to encourage others as well as himself, at turns humorous and serious. To one, “‘This too shall pass away.’ Never fear.” To another, “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 now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of liberty long after I am gone.” Lincoln also wrote, “The fight must go on. The question is not half settled. New . . . divisions will soon be upon our adversaries; and we shall have fun again,” and “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.” He predicted the ultimate triumph of their cause. “We are right, and can not finally fail . . . let all Republicans stand fast by their guns.” Lincoln expressed “an abiding faith that we shall beat them in the long run. Step by step the objects of the leaders will become too plain for the people to stand them.”
But following his defeat, Lincoln found it hard to see his place in that victory. Such despondency was evident when he encountered his friend Jesse Fell, who had been traveling throughout the country during the election. “Very frequently I have been asked,” Fell told him, “‘Who is this man Lincoln of your state, now canvassing in opposition to Senator Douglas?’” Fell pointed out “Judge Douglas being widely known, you are getting a national reputation through him, and the truth is I have a decided impression that if your popular history and efforts on the slavery question can be sufficiently brought before the people, you can be made a formidable, if not a successful, candidate for the Presidency.”
“What’s the use of talking of me for the Presidency,” Lincoln asked. “Seward, Chase, and others . . . are so much better known to the people” and had done so much more for the party. “Everybody knows them; nobody scarcely outside of Illinois knows me.”
Fell pressed the point and asked Lincoln to provide him with a biography he could distribute back east.
Lincoln rose to leave, wrapping his gray shawl around his shoulders. “Fell, I admit that I am ambitious and would like to be President. I am not insensible of the compliment you pay me and your interest in the matter, but there is no such good luck in store for me as the Presidency of these United States. Besides, there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else.” Bidding him goodnight, Lincoln “disappeared into the darkness.”