As Lincoln developed these ideas his reputation grew. In 1855 he almost won the Whig nomination for senator. He became a Republican shortly thereafter, and in June 1856, at the first Republican National Convention, he received 110 votes for the vice-presidential nomination. He seemed the logical man to pit against Douglas in 1858. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were well-attended and widely reported, for the idea of a direct confrontation between candidates for an important office captured the popular imagination.
The choice of the next senator lay, of course, in the hands of the Illinois legislature. Technically, Douglas and Lincoln were campaigning for candidates for the legislature who were pledged to support them for the
Senate seat. They presented a sharp physical contrast that must have helped voters sort out their differing points of view. Douglas was short and stocky, Lincoln long and lean. Douglas gave the impression of irrepressible energy. While speaking, he roamed the platform; he used broad gestures and bold, exaggerated arguments. Lincoln, on his part, was slow and deliberate of speech, his voice curiously high-pitched. He seldom used gestures or oratorical tricks, trying rather to create an impression of utter sincerity to add force to his remarks.
The two employed different political styles, each calculated to project a particular image. Douglas epitomized efficiency and success. He dressed in the latest fashion, favoring flashy vests and the finest broadcloth. He was a glad-hander and a heavy drinker—he apparently died of cirrhosis of the liver. Ordinarily he arrived in town in a private railroad car, to be met by a brass band, then to ride at the head of a parade to the appointed place.
Lincoln appeared before the voters as a man of the people. He wore ill-fitting black suits and a stovepipe hat—repository for letters, bills, scribbled notes, and other scraps—that exaggerated his great height. He presented a worn and rumpled appearance, partly because he traveled from place to place on day coaches, accompanied by only a few advisers. When local supporters came to meet him at the station, he preferred to walk with them through the streets to the scene of the debate.
Lincoln and Douglas maintained a high intellectual level in their speeches, but these were political debates. They were seeking not to influence future historians (who have nonetheless pondered their words endlessly) but to win votes. Both tailored their arguments to appeal to local audiences—more antislavery in the northern counties, more proslavery in the southern. They also tended to exaggerate their differences, which were not in fact enormous. Neither wanted to see slavery in the territories or thought it economically efficient, and neither sought to abolish it by political action or by force. Both believed blacks congenitally inferior to whites, although Douglas took more pleasure in expounding on supposed racial differences than Lincoln did.
Douglas’s strategy was to make Lincoln look like an abolitionist. He accused the Republicans of favoring racial equality and refusing to abide by the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. Himself he pictured as a heroic champion of democracy, attacked on one side by the “black” Republicans and on the other by Buchanan supporters, yet ready to fight to his last breath for popular sovereignty.
Lincoln tried to picture Douglas as proslavery and a defender of the Dred Scott decision. “Slavery is an unqualified evil to the negro, to the white man, to the soil, and to the State,” he said. “Judge Douglas,” he also said, “is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them.”
However, Lincoln often weakened the impact of his arguments, being perhaps too eager to demonstrate his conservatism. “All men are created equal,” he would say on the authority of the Declaration of Independence, only to add, “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.” He opposed allowing blacks to vote, to sit on juries, to marry whites, even to be citizens. He predicted the “ultimate extinction” of slavery, but when pressed he predicted that it would not occur “in less than a hundred years at the least.” He took a fence-sitting position on the question of abolition in the District of Columbia and stated flatly that he did not favor repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act.
In the debate at Freeport, a town northwest of Chicago near the Wisconsin line, Lincoln asked Douglas if, considering the Dred Scott decision, the people of a territory could exclude slavery before the territory became a state. Unhesitatingly Douglas replied that they could, simply by not passing the local laws essential for holding blacks in bondage. “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question,” Douglas said. “The people have the lawful means to introduce or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist. . . unless it is supported by local police regulations.”
This argument saved Douglas in Illinois. The Democrats carried the legislature by a narrow margin, whereas it is almost certain that if Douglas had accepted the Dred Scott decision outright, the balance would have swung to the Republicans. But the so-called Freeport Doctrine cost him heavily two years later when he made his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide”—southern extremists would not accept a man who suggested that the Dred Scott decision could be circumvented, although in fact Douglas had only stated the obvious.
Probably Lincoln had not thought beyond the senatorial election when he asked the question; he was merely hoping to keep Douglas on the defensive and perhaps injure him in southern Illinois, where considerable proslavery sentiment existed. In any case, defeat did Lincoln no harm politically. He had more than held his own against one of the most formidable debaters in politics, and his distinctive personality and point of view had impressed themselves on thousands of minds. Indeed, the defeat revitalized his political career.
The campaign of 1858 marked Douglas’s last triumph, Lincoln’s last defeat. Elsewhere the elections in the North went heavily to the Republicans. When the old Congress reconvened in December, northern-sponsored economic measures (a higher tariff, the transcontinental railroad, river and harbor improvements, a free homestead bill) were all blocked by southern votes.
Whether the South could continue to prevent the passage of this legislation in the new Congress was problematical. In early 1859 even many moderate Southerners were uneasy about the future. The radicals, made panicky by Republican victories and their own failure to win in Kansas, spoke openly of secession if a Republican were elected president in 1860. Lincoln’s “house divided” speech was quoted out of context, while Douglas’s Freeport Doctrine added to southern woes. When Senator William H. Seward of New York spoke of an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery, white Southerners became still more alarmed.
•••-[Read the Document Douglas, Debate at Galesburg, Illinois at Www. myhistorylab. com
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