LINCOLN AND DOUGLAS
In speaking of the orators and oratory that were evolved by the
Slavery issue, there are two names that cannot be omitted. These are
Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. It was the good fortune of the
writer to be an eye and ear witness of the closing bout, at Alton,
Illinois, between those two political champions in their great debate
of 1858. The contrast between the men was remarkable. Lincoln was very
tall and spare, standing up, when speaking, straight and stiff.
Douglas was short and stumpy, a regular roly-poly man. Lincoln's face
was calm and meek, almost immobile. He referred to it in his address
as "my rather melancholy face." Although plain and somewhat rugged, I
never regarded Lincoln's face as homely. I saw him many times and
talked with him, after the occasion now referred to. It was a good
face, and had many winning lines. Douglas's countenance, on the other
hand, was leonine and full of expression. His was a handsome face.
When lighted up by the excitement of debate it could not fail to
impress an audience.
Lincoln indulged in no gesticulation. If he had been addressing a
bench of judges he would not have been more impassive in his manner.
He was an animate, but not an animated, bean-pole. He poured out a
steady flow of words--three to Douglas's two--in a simple and
semi-conversational tone. He attempted no witticisms and indulged in
no oratorical claptrap. His address was pure argument. Douglas's
manner was one of excitement, and accompanied and emphasized by almost
continuous bodily movement. His hands and his feet, and especially
that pliable face of his, were all busy talking. He said sharp things,
evidently for their immediate effect on his audience, and showed that
he was not only master of all the arts of the practical stump orator,
but was ready to employ them.
But the most noticeable difference was in the voices of the men.
Douglas spoke first, and for the first minute or two was utterly
unintelligible. His voice seemed to be all worn out by his speaking in
that long and principally open-air debate. He simply bellowed. But
gradually he got command of his organ, and pretty soon, in a somewhat
laborious and painful way, it is true, he succeeded in making himself
understood.
Lincoln's voice, on the contrary, was without a quaver or a sign of
huskiness. He had been speaking in the open air exactly as much as
Douglas, but it was perfectly fresh, not a particle strained. It was a
perfect voice.
Those who wanted to understand Douglas had to press up close to the
platform from which he was speaking, and there was collected a dense,
but not very deep, crowd. There was no crowding in front of Lincoln
when he was speaking. He could be heard without it. There was a line
of wagons and carriages on the outskirts of the audience, and I
noticed, when Lincoln was speaking, that they were filled with
comfortably seated people listening to his address. They did not need
to go any nearer to him. The most of the shouting was done by
Douglas's partisans, composing a clear majority of the crowd, but it
was very manifest that Lincoln commanded the attention of the greater
number of those who were interested in the arguments. He did not act
as if he cared for the applause of the multitude. He said nothing,
apparently, simply to tickle the ears of his hearers.
Rather strange was it that the only points on which there did not
appear to be much, if any, difference between the two men were reached
when they came to the propositions they advocated. Douglas was
avowedly pro-slavery. He was talking in southern Illinois and on the
border of Missouri, to which many of his hearers belonged, and his
audience was mostly Southern in its feelings. He was plainly trying to
please that element. He not only approved of slavery where it was, but
metaphorically jumped on the negro and trampled all over him. He
denied that the negro was a "man" within the meaning of the
Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, however, as far as slavery in
the States was involved, met Douglas on his own ground, and "went him
one better." He said, "I have on all occasions declared as strongly as
Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing
institution of slavery."
If a stranger who knew nothing of the speakers and their party
associations had heard the two men on that occasion, he would have
concluded that one was strongly in favor of slavery and the other was
not opposed to it.
Their only disagreement was as to slavery in the Territories, and that
was more apparent than real. Lincoln contended for free soil through
the direct action of the general government. Douglas advocated a
roundabout way that led up to the same result. His proposition, which
he called "popular sovereignty," was to leave the decision to the
people of the Territories, saying he did not care whether they voted
slavery up or voted it down. That was a practical, although indirect
declaration in favor of free soil. The outcome of the contests in
Kansas and California showed that at that game the free States with
their superior resources were certain to win. The shrewder
slaveholders recognized that fact, and their antagonism to Douglas
grew accordingly. They deliberately defeated him for the Presidency in
1860, when he was the regular candidate of the Democratic party, by
running Breckenridge as an independent candidate. Otherwise Mr.
Douglas would have become President of the United States. Out of a
total of 4,680,193 votes, Mr. Lincoln had only 1,866,631. The rest
were divided between his three antagonists.
As between Lincoln and Douglas, who together held the controlling
hand, the slaveholders preferred Lincoln, against whom they had no
personal feeling, while they knew that his policy was no more
dangerous to their interests than the other man's, if faithfully
adhered to and carried out. Besides that, by this time many of them
had reached that state of mind in which they wanted a pretext for
secession from the Union. Lincoln's election would give them that
pretext while Douglas's would not.
On a boat that carried a portion of the audience, including the
writer, from Alton to St. Louis, after the debate was over, was a
prominent Missouri Democrat, afterwards a Confederate leader, who
expressed himself very freely. He declared that he would rather trust
the institutions of the South to the hands of a conservative and
honest man like "Old Abe," than to those of "a political jumping-jack
like Douglas." The most of the other Southern men and slaveholders
present seemed to concur in his views.
It is a fact that a good many of the Anti-Slavery leaders living
outside of Illinois, and a good many of those living within it, wanted
the Republicans of that State to let Douglas go back to the Senate
without a contest, believing that he would be far more useful to them
there than a Republican would be. It is not improbable that enough of
the Illinois Republicans took that view of the matter, and helped to
give Douglas the victory in what was a very close contest.
A portion of Douglas's speech was a spirited defense of his "squatter
sovereignty" doctrine against the denunciations of members of his own
political party, in the course of which he gave President Buchanan a
savage overhauling. It showed him to be a master of invective.
"Go it, husband; go it, bear," was Mr. Lincoln's comment on that part
of Douglas's address. I went to the debate with a very strong
prejudice against Douglas, looking upon him as one of the most
time-serving of those Northern men whom the Abolitionists called
"dough-faces." I confess that my views of the man were considerably
modified. I admired the pluck he showed in speaking when his voice was
in tatters. Still more did I like the resolution he displayed in
defying those leaders of his own party, including the President, who
wanted him to retreat from the ground he had taken, seeing that it had
become practically Anti-Slavery.
At the same time I had an almost worshipful admiration for Lincoln,
whom I had not before seen or heard. I expected a great deal from him.
I thought his closing appeal in that great debate would contain some
ringing words for freedom. He had, as I supposed, a great opportunity
for telling eloquence. He stood almost on the ground that had drunk
the blood of Lovejoy, the Anti-Slavery martyr. I felt that that fact
ought to inspire him. I was disappointed. Mr. Lincoln's speech was
altogether colorless. It was an argument, able but perfectly cold. It
was largely technical. There was no sentiment in it. Lovejoy had died
in vain so far as that address was concerned. I am free to say that I
was led to doubt whether Mr. Lincoln was then in hearty sympathy with
any movement looking to the freedom of the slave, and this impression
was not afterwards wholly removed from my mind.