LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS IN CHICAGO
In the last years before the Civil War, Illinois became a political
storm centre to which the eyes of the whole nation were turned.
Reaching farther south than any other lake state, and bounded on the
west by the Mississippi River,--the main artery of trade and travel of
the south,--she was bound geographically and commercially to the south.
But on the other hand she reached north to Lake Michigan, a part of
the great system of inland waterways of the North. More than any other
state she presented in miniature the condition of the nation, divided
thus between north and south. Moreover her settlers, moving westward
along the lines of latitude, had come from both sections. With a
southern sentiment in those counties that were nearest to Kentucky and
Missouri, she combined in her upper counties men from New England, New
York, and Pennsylvania with the strongest northern principles. Seeing
within her own bounds the elements of the great national conflict, she
became a state whose strongest sentiment was for union, for which in
the last analysis all her best political leaders stood.
Into this state came Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Arnold Douglas when
they were young men, Lincoln from Kentucky after a stay in Indiana,
and Douglas from Vermont by way of New York State. In Illinois these
two men fought out in the decade before the Civil War the great
contest of the two national parties of the time. The campaign of 1858,
with its famous series of joint debates between them, was opened in
Chicago by speeches of Douglas and Lincoln from the balcony of the
Tremont House. In Chicago the National Republican Convention nominated
Lincoln for President on the 16th of May, 1860. To a royal welcome in
Chicago Douglas returned in the spring of 1861 after his noble and
disinterested support of his elected rival and his patriotic efforts
for the preservation of the Union. Here within a few weeks he died.
Before we pass to the story of these events in Chicago we must learn a
little more of the condition of affairs in the lake states during the
interval since the War of 1812. Of the growth of their cities and of
their great prosperity we shall speak in detail in later chapters. It
is sufficient to say that the movement of population, of wealth, and of
power into the West had become so great that the Republicans in 1860
considered Chicago the fitting place for their national convention.
Of the definite problems of the great sectional contest, the lake
states had a concrete as well as a theoretic knowledge. They were
located on the northern frontier of the United States, and they dipped
down from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and sixty miles into the
south. Inevitably they became the scene of fugitive slave migration. In
spite of the strict laws of the United States and the bitter protests
of the South, the escaped slave found friends when he slipped over
the border into the free states, and was helped by them into Canada,
where his safety was assured. Since 1815 there had been a regularly
organized system of passing these runaways from one place to another
on the northern route, a system which so baffled and mystified the
unsuccessful masters in their search that they had given it the name of
the “Underground Railroad.” The route through Ohio was the shortest of
these lines. Only a little more than two hundred miles lay between the
slave states south of the Ohio River and freedom. Along the river were
twenty-two or twenty-three stations, and every port on Lake Erie was a
point of departure. The five principal outlets were Toledo, Sandusky,
Cleveland, Ashtabula, and Fairport, and through these stations there
was an ever increasing procession of fugitives. Within this one state
it has been calculated that there were nearly three thousand miles of
“underground road.” Western Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois had
their roads, converging at Erie, Detroit, Toledo, Michigan City, and
Chicago. Such was the anti-slavery sentiment on which Lincoln could
rely.
A hasty sketch of the lives of Lincoln and Douglas before their
speeches in Chicago in 1858 will show the typical western conditions
which had put them in their leading positions. Douglas was forty-five
years old, Lincoln four years older. Born in Brandon, Vermont, Stephen
Arnold Douglas was the son of a young physician, whose father was
Benajah Douglass,[3] a New York pioneer who had moved to Vermont and
there been prominent in local politics, and whose mother was Martha
Arnold, a descendant of Governor William Arnold of Rhode Island. Dr.
Douglass had married Sally Fisk, the daughter of a prosperous farmer.
He died when Stephen was very young, and the widow and children went
to live with their mother’s bachelor brother on the Fisk farm. Here
Stephen lived the life of a healthy Vermont boy until the marriage of
his uncle and the birth of a son changed his standing in the family.
When the boy began to propose going to Brandon Academy to prepare
for college, his uncle told him kindly that he could not provide for
his further education. Stephen in a fit of boyish anger left the
farm and apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker in Middlebury. He
stayed with him for a year, delighting in the novelty of the life and
in the companionship with a group of young men with whom he could
discuss politics and eulogize his favorite hero, Andrew Jackson; but,
nevertheless, he grew weary of the humble position of apprentice. After
two years with this man and with another cabinet-maker, he gave up the
trade and returned to the home of his mother, enrolling himself at
Brandon Academy.
[3] The elder Douglass spelled his name with a double _s_.
The marriage of his sister and later of his mother started the boy
at the age of seventeen on his westward journeying. It put him into
Canandaigua, New York, where he pursued his studies at its excellent
academy for three years, and prepared for his later career by studying
law out of school in the offices of local attorneys. The western
fever was upon him, and life on one of the great channels of westward
migration induced him in the spring of 1833, against the wishes of his
relatives and friends, to start for Buffalo and the tempting world
beyond.
Douglas’s first six months in the new country were marked by hardship
and by a serious illness. Lack of funds drove him to teaching in a
little Illinois village in place of practising law as he had hoped.
Within a year, however, the penniless boy had been admitted to the
Illinois bar, by what must have been a very simple examination, and was
happily established in a law office in the court-house at Jacksonville,
Illinois. From this time on law was subordinated to his chosen pursuit,
politics, for which his ready comradeship, his acute intelligence, and
his keen ambition fitted him admirably. He filled at astonishingly
early ages several minor positions, working his way into the hearts
of the people and into the councils of the Democratic party. He was
secretary of state for Illinois at the age of twenty-seven, and in that
year was also made a district judge. At thirty he was sent as a member
of Congress to Washington. Reëlected twice he was promoted in 1847 to
the honor of senatorship, and became immediately prominent as chairman
of a leading committee. During these years he married a southern lady
and removed to Chicago, with whose commercial interests he allied
himself closely by investing in real estate, the promise of which he
was quick to see.
To Chicago and northern Illinois Douglas rendered a great service by
contending for the building of the Illinois Central Railroad through
the upper counties of the state to Chicago as a terminal. In this
measure, whose passage he secured by making a combination plan with a
southern railroad so that the proposed bill contemplated in the future
a trunk line from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and thus became
a national instead of a local measure, Senator Douglas showed himself
more than a state and party politician. There was statesmanlike genius
in a plan thus to unite the North and South industrially and socially
at a time when the tendency was to separate interests and separate
policies. His speech in Congress was one of the first to set forth the
power of the Great Lakes and the place of the Mississippi Valley in the
national well-being.
Reëlected senator for several successive periods, he became through
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which he himself drafted, the advocate of
“popular sovereignty,” a phrase which he coined to take the place of
the less dignified term “squatter sovereignty,” that had previously
designated the principle that each state had a right to decide such
questions as slavery for itself. He returned to Chicago in 1854, to be
met by a mob who denounced his policy, and immediately threw himself
into an active campaign in the hostile counties of northern Illinois.
When he came back to secure his seat in the Senate for another term,
Douglas had been placed by the course of national events in an entirely
new position. Bitterly resenting the trickery which had made “popular
sovereignty” a mere name and had given the state of Kansas at the
Lecompton convention into the hands of the pro-slavery men, Douglas
stood out on the floor of the Senate against his party and declared
his opposition to the Lecompton constitution. Revolting against his
own party, he was nevertheless representing the sentiment of Illinois
and the Northwest, and he returned to Chicago in 1858 to an unequalled
popularity.
It was four years since Douglas had been in Chicago,--since the day
when he had been met by a storm of abuse and his address had been
heralded by the lowering of flags to half-mast and the tolling of bells
as for some public calamity. Now an enthusiastic delegation met him at
Michigan City and escorted him by special train to his home. As his
train entered Chicago it was greeted by the booming of cannon, and
every sign of public enthusiasm. Crowds filled the streets and banners
waved from the balconies and windows. The whole city was brilliantly
decorated; bands of music marched the streets; and in a carriage drawn
by six horses and surrounded by a military escort Senator Douglas, “The
Defender of Popular Sovereignty,” as the banners proclaimed him, drove
to the Tremont House, receiving everywhere a welcome that proclaimed
him the idol of his fellow-citizens.
The Tremont House was the finest hotel in the city. The first house
of that name had been built in 1832. It had been burned, as had
its immediate successor, and the proprietor had erected on the land
a fine brick building five stories and a half high, containing two
hundred rooms, whose extravagant cost of seventy thousand dollars
and whose magnificence the business men of Chicago had been inclined
to ridicule as entirely beyond the possible needs of the city at its
erection, but which they were now beginning to regard as an evidence of
great foresight on the part of its builder. From its balcony Douglas
delivered on the night of his arrival the first address of the campaign
for the senatorship in which, by the nomination of the Republicans,
Abraham Lincoln was to be his opponent.
While Douglas had been carrying off the honors of the Democratic party
of Illinois, Lincoln had been rising more slowly to prominence in the
ranks of the Whig and later of the newly organized Republican party.
With the events of his early life his subsequent career has made every
one familiar. He had been a practising lawyer as well as politician,
had been several times to the state legislature, and in 1846 had been
sent to Congress. Opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he had done much to
organize the new Republican party in Illinois, and was recognized as
its strongest man. He was now unanimously named as “the first and only
choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate.”
Yet, although known to the Republicans of the Northwest as a lawyer of
ability and a political leader, he seemed no match for the popular and
well-known senator from Washington.
With Lincoln standing behind him within the hotel, Douglas made on
the evening of the 9th of July a long address to the thousands of
people who surged in the street below the balcony. This speech was a
defence of his Lecompton attitude, and a review of his differences
with Lincoln’s propositions, as expressed in his speech accepting the
nomination, the famous “house-divided-against-itself” declaration.
Douglas was a short, broad-shouldered, thick-set man, with great
alertness and animation of manner. A traveller from the East who was
staying at the hotel recorded her impressions of the two speakers.
Of Douglas, she said that in manner he combined force and unusual
grace. His head was noble, almost Websterian, his voice pleasant,
and altogether he was “a most effective popular speaker.” The next
night Lincoln spoke to a large and enthusiastic audience from the same
balcony. Because he was not so well-known the writer described him more
fully. In person tall and awkward, and in manner ungainly, his face
still had such good humor, generosity, and intellect beaming from it
that it made the eye love to linger there until one almost fancied him
good-looking. As a political speaker she found him ready, humorous,
and argumentative, with a gift at telling anecdotes with inconceivable
quaintness and effect.
The two candidates had met many times before, and had debated together
as early as 1834. Lincoln was not underrated by Douglas as a weak
opponent in the campaign. When Douglas heard of his nomination he
had said, “I shall have my hands full. 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.”
Immediately after the Chicago speeches the two candidates set out on
the tour of Illinois which soon became a three months’ continuation of
joint debates. As a result Douglas went back to the Senate, but he went
back a weakened man to a divided party. Two years later, while he was
being nominated for the presidency by one wing of his party, Lincoln
was being nominated for the same office by the Republicans at Chicago.
When it was decided to hold the National Republican Convention in that
city, the people set about providing a building for the occasion. At
Pittsburg in 1856 a hall for two thousand was large enough. At the
corner of Lake and Market streets the Republicans erected a huge oblong
wooden building which would hold ten thousand men, and as the event
proved it was not large enough by a third, and twenty thousand more
clamored in the streets for admittance. This structure was absolutely
bare, its walls being broken by two rows of windows, and its two front
corners surmounted by small square towers with flagstaffs. Over the
door was an arched front bearing the words “Republican Wigwam”. It cost
seven thousand dollars and its great virtue was the excellence of its
acoustic properties.
Thousands of men came to the city for the convention and the excitement
was tremendous. During the first two days of the gathering the time
was given up to framing the platform and to other business, and it was
not till the third day that the four hundred and sixty-five delegates
proceeded to balloting. The New Yorkers were jubilant in their
assurance of the success of their nominee, Mr. Seward, and had created
the same impression in many circles. As a last demonstration the Seward
men held a great parade on the morning of the third day, the 18th of
May; but by this act they lost more than they gained, for while they
were marching about with bands the Lincoln men filled up the Wigwam,
and when the Seward men arrived they had to take back seats.
When the convention was called to order, there was not an unoccupied
space a foot square in the building. The three broad doorways were
crowded, and outside tens of thousands of men thronged the streets.
The excitement was tremendous, and thunders of applause burst forth at
the names of Seward and Lincoln. When the delegates settled down to
voting, the result of the first ballot was 173-1/2 for Seward and 102
for Lincoln, the rest of the votes going to the six minor candidates.
On the next ballot the states abandoned their “favorite sons,” turning
to one or the other of the two leaders, with the result that Seward
had 184-1/2 and Lincoln 181. Two hundred and thirty-three votes were
necessary for a choice. As the delegates were preparing for the third
ballot, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Committee entered the
hall with a large crayon likeness of “Honest Old Abe,” while Judge
Davis followed, carrying on his shoulders a long, moss-covered old rail
bearing the legend, “Split by Lincoln.” The dense crowd went wild with
enthusiasm.
On the third ballot Lincoln had 231-1/2, Seward 180. One vote and a
half more were needed, and there was a moment of breathless silence
until the chairman of the Ohio delegation rose and announced the
change of four votes from Chase to Lincoln. For a moment the hall was
still, and then as every one drew a long breath of relief the sound in
the Wigwam was like the rush of a mighty wind. Then the thunders of
applause and the shouting broke loose. The man on the roof who had been
reporting the balloting to the crowds without leaned over the skylight
to find out who had been the man named. One of the tellers shouted
above the din, “Fire the salute! Abe Lincoln is nominated!” and outside
the waiting thousands took up the cry. So loud was the uproar that men
in the Wigwam could hardly hear the sound of the cannon discharged on
the roof of the building, or the answering salute of one hundred guns
fired from the roof of the Tremont House. Votes were promptly changed
over until the number for Lincoln was three hundred and fifty-four,
and then the convention adjourned. It had been one of the memorable
conventions of the nation, and had been made up of a large number of
leading men. Sixty of the delegates were later sent by their respective
states to Congress, and many of the members were made governors. A
great man had been called to lead the nation through a great crisis.
One more memorable scene in the lives of these two men took place at
the Wigwam, which had been rechristened National Hall. To Chicago
Douglas returned after war had been declared. With rare nobility and
greatness he had supported President Lincoln and the administration
in Washington, upholding Lincoln in every way that the leader of a
great party, who had polled at the last election over a million votes,
could. No leader has ever shown less personal feeling and more true
greatness than Mr. Douglas in that crisis. He sank the partisan in the
patriot and turned all his energies towards the saving of the Union.
With Lincoln’s approval and gratitude he left Washington to arouse
the sentiment of loyalty and Unionism in the critical Northwest, and
made in April, 1861, a series of addresses along his homeward route,
closing with a great plea in the Capitol at Springfield. One who had
never admired him, listening now to this speech for the support of the
government and the defence of the Union, said that he did not think it
was possible for a human being to produce a more prodigious effect with
spoken words. Southern as well as northern Illinois was ready after
this for the conflict.
As he entered Chicago Douglas was met with a remarkable demonstration.
He had come home many times, sometimes for honor and sometimes for
abuse, but never to meet the united regard and support of men of all
parties and all beliefs. In the Wigwam he made a final address, setting
forth to his hearers the situation, and announcing that the critical
time was come. “The conspiracy is now known.... There are only two
sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or
against it.” For the first time he drew the sharp distinction setting
the two sides in striking contrast, and calling the people of Illinois
to loyalty. The gentle side of his personality made him foresee with
dread the horrors of war, and he besought the people to remember that
they were a Christian nation and as such they must prosecute the war,
saving as far as possible the innocent, the women and children, from
suffering.
The Chicago speech was published all over the country, and Douglas
supporters recognized that their leader had become the first of the
great company of “War Democrats,” of which General Logan and other
distinguished men were to be loyal members. In a few days he was taken
ill and died at the Tremont House. His last words were a message to
his sons to “obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United
States.” Chicago, Illinois, and the nation mourned him as a true
patriot.