In his speech at Springfield, June 17, accepting the nomination of his party for the Senate, Mr. Lincoln had uttered the words which have since become historic. They are quoted at length, as they soon furnished the text for his severe arraignment by Douglas in debate.
The words are:
"We are now far into this fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. 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 pa.s.sed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
I believe this country 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 the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
This, at the time, was a bold utterance, and, it was believed by many, would imperil Mr. Lincoln"s chances for election. Mr. Blaine in his "Twenty Years of Congress," says:
"Mr. Lincoln had been warned by intimate friends to whom he had communicated the contents of his speech in advance of its delivery, that he was treading on dangerous ground, that he would be misinterpreted as a disunionist, and that he might fatally damage the Republican party by making its existence synonymous with a destruction of the Government."
The opening speech of Senator Douglas at Chicago a few days later-- sounding the keynote of his campaign--was in the main an arraignment of his opponent for an attempt to precipitate an internecine conflict, and array in deadly hostility the North against the South.
He said:
"In other words, Mr. Lincoln advocates boldly and clearly a war of sections, a war of the North against the South, of the free States against the slave States--a war of extermination--to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other shall be subdued, and all the States shall either become free or become slave."
The two speeches, followed by others of like tenor, aroused public interest in the State as it had never been before. The desire to hear the candidates from the same platform became general. The proposal for a joint debate came from Mr. Lincoln on July 24 and was soon thereafter accepted. Seven joint meetings were agreed upon, the first to be at Ottawa, August 21, and the last at Alton, October 15. The meetings were held in the open, and at each place immense crowds were in attendance. The friends of Mr. Lincoln largely preponderated in the northern portion of the State, those of Douglas in the southern, while in the centre the partisans of the respective candidates were apparently equal in numbers. The interest never flagged for a moment from the beginning to the close.
The debate was upon a high plane; each candidate enthusiastically applauded by his friends, and respectfully heard by his opponents.
The speakers were men of dignified presence, their bearing such as to challenge respect in any a.s.semblage. There was nothing of the "grotesque" about the one, nothing of the "political juggler" about the other. Both were deeply impressed with the gravity of the questions at issue, and of what might prove their far-reaching consequence to the country.
Kindly reference by each speaker to the other characterized the debates from the beginning. "My friend Lincoln," and "My friend the Judge," were expressions of constant occurrence during the debate. While each mercilessly attacked the political utterances of the other, good feeling in the main prevailed. Something being pardoned to the spirit of debate, the amenities were well observed.
They had been personally well known to each other for many years; had served together in the Legislature when the State Capitol was at Vandalia, and at a later date, Lincoln had appeared before the Supreme Court when Douglas was one of the judges. The amusing allusions to each other were taken in good part. Mr. Lincoln"s profound humor is now a proverb. It never appeared to better advantage than during these debates. In criticising Mr. Lincoln"s attack upon Chief Justice Taney and his a.s.sociates for the Dred Scott decision, Douglas declared it to be an attempt to secure a reversal of the high tribunal by an appeal to a town meeting.
It reminded him of the saying of Colonel Strode that the judicial system of Illinois was perfect, except that "there should be an appeal allowed from the Supreme Court to two justices of the peace."
Lincoln replied, "That was when you were on the bench, Judge."
Referring to Douglas"s allusion to him as a kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, he said:
"Then as the Judge has complimented me with these pleasant t.i.tles, I was a little taken, for it came from a great man. I was not very much accustomed to flattery and it came the sweeter to me. I was like the Hoosier with the gingerbread, when he said he reckoned he loved it better and got less of it than any other man."
In opening the debate at Ottawa, Douglas said:
"In the remarks I have made on the platform and the position of Mr. Lincoln, I mean nothing personally disrespectful or unkind to that gentleman. I have known him for twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted.
We were both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school-teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem. He was more successful in his occupation than I was in mine, and hence more fortunate in this world"s goods. Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake. I made as good a school-teacher as I could, and when a cabinet-maker I made a good bedstead and table, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus and secretaries than anything else. I met him in the Legislature and had a sympathy with him because of the up-hill struggle we both had in life. He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse-race or a fist-fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody. I sympathized with him because he was struggling with difficulties, and so was I."
To which Lincoln replied:
"The Judge is woefully at fault about his friend Lincoln being a grocery-keeper. I don"t know as it would be a sin if I had been; but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in the world. It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of one Winter in a little still house up at the head of a hollow."
The serious phases of the debates will now be considered. The opening speech was by Mr. Douglas. That he possessed rare power as a debater, all who heard him can bear witness. Mr. Blaine in his history says:
"His mind was fertile in resources. He was master of logic. In that peculiar style of debate which in its intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. He used good English, terse, pointed, vigorous. He disregarded the adornments of rhetoric. He never cited historic precedents except from the domain of American politics. Inside that field, his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical. He could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions."
Douglas was, in very truth, imbued with little of mere sentiment.
He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer.
What Coleridge has defined wisdom--"common sense, in an uncommon degree"--was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he struck at once at the very core of the controversy. Possibly no man was ever less inclined "to darken counsel with words without knowledge." Positive, and aggressive to the last degree, he never sought "by indirections to find directions out." In statesmanship-- in all that pertained to human affairs--he was intensely practical.
With him, in the words of Macaulay, "one acre in Middles.e.x is worth a princ.i.p.ality in Utopia."
It is a pleasure to recall--after the lapse of half a century--the two men as they shook hands upon the speaker"s stand, just before the opening of the debates that were to mark an epoch in American history. Stephen A. Douglas! Abraham Lincoln! As they stood side by side and looked out upon "the sea of upturned faces"--it was indeed a picture to live in the memory of all who witnessed it.
The one stood for the old ordering of things, in an emphatic sense for the Government as established by the fathers--with all its compromises. The other, recognizing equally with his opponent the binding force of Const.i.tutional obligation, yet looking, away from present surroundings, "felt the inspiration of the coming of the grander day." As has been well said, "The one faced the past; the other, the future."
The name of Lincoln is now a household word. But little can be written of him that is not already known to the world. Nothing that can be uttered or withheld can add to, or detract from, his imperishable fame. But it must be remembered that his great opportunity and fame came after the stirring events separated from us by the pa.s.sing of fifty years. It is not the Lincoln of history, but Lincoln the country lawyer, the debater, the candidate of his party for political office, with whom we have now to do. Born in Kentucky, much of his early life was spent in Indiana, and all his professional and public life up to his election to the Presidency, in Illinois. His early opportunities for study, like those of Douglas, were meagre indeed. Neither had had the advantage of the thorough training of the schools. Of both it might truly have been said, "They knew men rather than books." From his log-cabin home upon the Sangamon, Mr. Lincoln had in his early manhood volunteered, and was made captain of his company, in what was so well known to the early settlers of Illinois as the Black Hawk War. Later on, he was surveyor of his county, and three times a member of the State Legislature. At the time of the debates with Senator Douglas, Mr. Lincoln had for many years been a resident of Springfield, and a recognized leader of the bar. As an advocate, he had probably no superior in the State. During the days of the Whig party he was an earnest exponent of its principles, and an able champion of its candidates. As such, he had in successive contests eloquently presented the claims of Harrison, Clay, Taylor, and Scott to the Presidency. In 1846, he was elected a Representative in Congress, and upon his retirement he resumed the active practice of his profession. Upon the dissolution of the Whig party, he cast in his fortunes with the new political organization, and was in very truth one of the builders of the Republican party. At its first national convention, in 1856, he received a large vote for nomination to the Vice-Presidency, and during the memorable campaign of that year canva.s.sed the State in advocacy of the election of Fremont and Dayton, the candidates of the Philadelphia convention.
In the year 1858--that of the great debates--Douglas was the better known of the opposing candidates in the country at large. In a speech then recently delivered in Springfield, Mr. Lincoln said:
"There is still another disadvantage under which we labor and to which I will ask your attention. It arises out of the relative positions of the two persons who stand before the State as candidates for the Senate. Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainly at no distant day to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his ruddy, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices, land-offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the contrary, n.o.body has ever seen in my poor lank face that any cabbages were sprouting out."
Both, however, were personally well known in Illinois. Each was by unanimous nomination the candidate of his party. Douglas had known sixteen years of continuous service in one or the other House of Congress. In the Senate, he had held high debate with Seward, Sumner, and Chase from the North, and during the last session--since he had a.s.sumed a position of antagonism to the Buchanan administration--had repeatedly measured swords with Tombs, Benjamin, and Jefferson Davis, chief among the great debaters of the South.
Mr. Lincoln"s services in Congress had been limited to a single term in the lower house, and his great fame was yet to be achieved, not as a legislator, but as Chief Executive during the most critical years of our history.
Such, in brief, were the opposing candidates as they entered the lists of debate at Ottawa, on the twenty-first day of August, 1858.
Both were in the prime of manhood, thoroughly equipped for the conflict, and surrounded by throngs of devoted friends. Both were gifted with remarkable forensic powers and alike hopeful as to the result. Each recognizing fully the strength of his opponent, his own powers were constantly at their tension.
"the blood more stirs To rouse a lion than to start a hare."
In opening, Senator Douglas made brief reference to the political condition of the country prior to the year 1854. He said:
"The Whig and the Democratic were the two great parties then in existence; both national and patriotic, advocating principles that were universal in their application; while these parties differed in regard to banks, tariff, and sub-treasury, they agreed on the slavery question which now agitates the Union. They had adopted the compromise measures of 1850 as the basis of a full solution of the slavery question in all its forms; that these measures had received the endors.e.m.e.nt of both parties in their National Conventions of 1852, thus affirming the right of the people of each State and Territory to decide as to their domestic inst.i.tutions for themselves; that this principle was embodied in the bill reported by me in 1854 for the organization of the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska; in order that there might be no misunderstanding, these words were inserted in that bill: "It is the true intent and meaning of this act, not to legislate slavery into any State or Territory, or to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic inst.i.tutions in their own way, subject only to the Federal Const.i.tution.""
Turning to his opponent, he said:
"I desire to know whether Mr. Lincoln to-day stands as he did in 1854 in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law; whether he stands pledged to-day as he did in 1854 against the admission of any more slave States into the Union, even if the people want them; whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a Const.i.tution as the people of that State may see fit to make. I want to know whether he stands to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; I desire to know whether he stands pledged to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the United States north as well as south of the Missouri Compromise line. I desire him to answer whether he is opposed to acquisition of any more territory unless slavery is prohibited therein. I want his answer to these questions."
Douglas then addressed himself to the already quoted words of Mr. Lincoln"s Springfield speech commencing: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." He declared the Government had existed for seventy years divided into free and slave States as our fathers made it; that at the time the Const.i.tution was framed there were thirteen States, twelve of which were slave-holding, and one a free State; that if the doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln that all should be free or all slave had prevailed, the twelve would have overruled the one, and slavery would have been established by the Const.i.tution on every inch of the Republic, instead of being left, as our fathers wisely left it, for each State to decide for itself. He then declared that:
"Uniformity in the local laws and inst.i.tutions of the different States is neither possible nor desirable; that if uniformity had been adopted when the Government was established it must inevitably have been the uniformity of slavery everywhere, or the uniformity of negro citizenship and negro equality everywhere. I hold that humanity and Christianity both require that the negro shall have and enjoy every right and every privilege and every immunity consistent with the safety of the society in which he lives.
The question then arises, What rights and privileges are consistent with the public good? This is a question which each State and each Territory must decide for itself. Illinois has decided it for herself."
He then said:
"Now, my friends, if we will only act conscientiously upon this great principle of popular sovereignty, it guarantees to each State and Territory the right to do as it pleases on all things local and domestic; instead of Congress interfering, we will continue at peace one with another. This doctrine of Mr. Lincoln of uniformity among the inst.i.tutions of the different States is a new doctrine never dreamed of by Washington, Madison, or the framers of the Government. Mr. Lincoln and his party set themselves up as wiser than the founders of the Government, which has flourished for seventy years under the principle of popular sovereignty, recognizing the right of each State to do as it pleased. Under that principle, we have grown from a nation of three or four millions to one of thirty millions of people. We have crossed the mountains and filled up the whole Northwest, turning the prairies into a garden, and building up churches and schools, thus spreading civilization and Christianity where before there was nothing but barbarism.
Under that principle we have become from a feeble nation the most powerful upon the face of the earth, and if we only adhere to that principle we can go forward increasing in territory, in power, in strength, and in glory, until the Republic of America shall be the North Star that shall guide the friends of freedom throughout the civilized world. I believe that his new doctrine preached by Mr. Lincoln will dissolve the Union if it succeeds; trying to array all the Northern States in one body against the Southern; to excite a sectional war between the free States and the slave States in order that one or the other may be driven to the wall."
Mr. Lincoln said in reply:
"I think and will try to show, that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is wrong--wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska; wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it. This declared indifference, but as I must think covert zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our Republic of an example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free inst.i.tutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites. I have no prejudices against the Southern people; they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did now exist amongst us we would not instantly give it up. This I believe of the ma.s.ses North and South. When the Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the inst.i.tution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the same. I surely will not blame them for what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly powers were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing inst.i.tution."
Declaring that he did not advocate freeing the negroes, and making them our political and social equals, but suggesting that gradual systems of emanc.i.p.ation might be adopted by the States, he added, "But for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South. But all this to my judgment furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our free territory than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law."
He then added:
"I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the inst.i.tution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. But I hold that notwithstanding all this there is no reason in the world why the negro is not ent.i.tled 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 ent.i.tled to these as the white man. 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 the 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."
Referring to the quotation from his Springfield speech of the words, "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he said:
"Does the Judge say it can stand? If he does, then there is a question of veracity, not between him and me, but between the Judge and an authority of somewhat higher character. I leave it to you to say whether, in the history of our Government, the inst.i.tution of slavery has not only failed to be a bond of union, but on the contrary been an apple of discord and an element of division in the house. If so, then I have a right to say that in regard to this question the Union is a house divided against itself; and when the Judge reminds me that I have often said to him that the inst.i.tution of slavery has existed for eighty years in some States and yet it does not exist in some others, I agree to that fact, and I account for it by looking at the position in which our fathers originally placed it--restricting it from the new Territories where it had not gone, and legislating to cut off its source by abrogation of the slave trade, thus putting the seal of legislation against its spread, the public mind did rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction. Now, I believe if we could arrest its spread and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would--as for eighty years past --believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction."
Referring further to his Springfield speech, he declared that he had no thought of doing anything to bring about a war between the free and slave States; that he had no thought in the world that he was doing anything to bring about social and political equality of the black and white races.
Pursuing this line of argument, he insisted that the first step in the conspiracy, the pa.s.sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, followed soon by the Dred Scott Decision--the latter fitting perfectly into the niche left by the former--"in such a case, we feel it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin, Roger and James, all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first blow was struck."