Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
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 indignation 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.”
D
OUGLAS 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 all 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.
These statements of Seward and Chase, coming from the leaders of the antislavery cause, reveal that racism, the belief in white supremacy, was deeply embedded in the entire country. It is only in this context that the statements of Lincoln and his contemporaries can be judged.
Less than two decades earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was deeply opposed to slavery and believed emancipation to be inevitable, had written: “The most dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of blacks on its soil.” Even in the states where slavery had been eradicated and where suffrage had been granted, he observed, countless obstacles had been placed in the way of the black man. “If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds only whites among his judges…. His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his own priests and churches. One does not close the doors of Heaven to him; yet inequality hardly stops at the boundary of the other world. When the Negro is no longer, his bones are cast to one side, and the difference of conditions is still found even in the equality of death.” Even when abolition should come, Tocqueville predicted, Americans would “have still to destroy three prejudices much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.”
The dilemma faced by advocates of emancipation was the place of free blacks in American society. The opposition to assimilation was almost universal. Blacks were already barred from entering the borders of many free states. Confronting such barriers, what “in the name of humanity,” Henry Clay asked, “is to become of them—where are they to go?”
“My first impulse,” Lincoln had said before, “would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.” Lincoln had long supported the same implausible plan endorsed by Edward Bates and Henry Clay, the notion of compensating slaveowners and returning freed slaves to their homeland. Without such a program, “colonizers” argued, Southern whites would never accept the idea of emancipation. Still, Lincoln took note of the staggering administrative and economic difficulties. More than 3 million blacks lived in the South, representing 35 percent of the entire Southern population. The overwhelming majority had no desire to go to Africa, and only a few spokesmen, not including Lincoln, advocated forced deportation. They were here to stay.
“What then?” Lincoln asked. “Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?” But once freed, could they be made “politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question…. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”
Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.” This statement goes to the heart of his disagreement with Douglas; when such an influential leader as Mary’s “Little Giant” insisted that blacks were not included in the Declaration, he was molding public opinion and bending history in the wrong direction. “He is blowing out the moral lights around us,” Lincoln warned, borrowing a phrase from his hero Henry Clay, “eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.”
Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”