Congress adjourned on June 16th and Douglas, after spending a few
days in New York, returned to Chicago. Meanwhile the people of
Illinois had awakened to great political activity. On April 21st
the regular Democratic Convention was held at Springfield and
without opposition passed a resolution endorsing his candidacy for
re-election. On June 9th the "Administration Democracy," consisting
of the Federal office holders and those democrats who condemned
his anti-Lecompton battle, held a Convention at Springfield, the
purpose of which was to divide the party and insure his defeat. On
the 17th the Republicans held their Convention at Springfield and
chose Lincoln as their candidate for United States Senator.
The nomination of Lincoln was not an accident. He was prepared to
accept it in a speech that should serve as the text of his campaign
and was destined to great fame in after years. Against the resolve of
his friends he announced the dangerous doctrine that the Government
could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "A house
divided against itself cannot stand." He did not expect the Union
to be dissolved or the house to fall, but that it would cease to be
divided. "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 till it shall become alike lawful
in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the establishment of
squatter sovereignty was a great step towards the nationalization of
slavery. This was followed by the Dred Scott decision forbidding
Congress to interfere with it in the Territories. All the
legislation of Congress had carefully reserved a place for this
expected decision. Douglas had hinted it in the Senate long before
it was announced. Pierce and Buchanan had proclaimed it before the
Judges. "We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations
are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed
timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten
out at different times and different place, and by different
workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,--and
when we see these timbers all joined together and see they exactly
make the frame of a house or mill, all the tenons and mortises
exactly fitting, * * * * * we find it impossible not to believe
that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one
another from the beginning and all worked upon a common plan or
draft drawn up before the first blow was struck."
He repelled the suggestion made in some quarters that the Republicans
ought to cease their fight on Douglas and rally to his support in
his contest with the slavery propagandists. He reminded them that
the very essence of Republican faith was hostility to slavery, while
Douglas frankly declared that he did not care whether it was voted
up or voted down. The cause must be entrusted to those whose hearts
were in the work and who did care for the result.
On the 9th of July Douglas returned to Chicago and received
a royal welcome. A special train loaded with prominent citizens
was dispatched to meet him. On his arrival he was greeted with
tumultuous applause. He addressed the vast multitude from the
balcony of the Tremont House. Thirty thousand people are said
to have gathered to hear him. He was profoundly pleased by this
splendid ovation so strikingly in contrast with the reception
four years before, when his neighbors refused even to hear him in
defense of his course. Among the distinguished visitors on the
speakers' stand sat Lincoln.
After thanking his audience for the enthusiastic reception, he plunged
into the subject then uppermost in the public mind by rehearsing
his relation to the whole Kansas problem. He reminded them of his
early and consistent devotion to popular sovereignty, which had
been so utterly outraged by the Lecompton Constitution. He assured
his hearers, however, that his opposition to that Constitution arose
from no sentimental morality and bore no relation to the ethics of
slavery. He insisted, not that it be good or just, but that it be
submitted to a vote of the settlers.
He then addressed himself to Lincoln's Springfield speech. He
attacked his extreme doctrines with characteristic adroitness.
Lincoln's speech was of doubtful prudence as a campaign argument.
It really foreboded civil war or a peaceful dissolution of the
Union. While this alternative was, perhaps, inevitable, political
expediency forbade its avowal. Douglas declared the necessary
result of his philosophy to be a war of sections, a war of the North
against the South, of the free States against the slave States,
to be continued relentlessly until the one or the other should
be subdued and all should either become free States or all become
slave States. But this was not the true theory of the American
Union. The States differed widely in soil, climate, resources,
tastes and habits. Their laws and institutions were utterly unlike.
New Hampshire's laws were unfit for South Carolina; those of New
York were not suited to the Pacific Coast. Uniformity in local
and domestic affairs would be destructive of State rights, State
sovereignty and personal liberty. Uniformity was the parent
of despotism the world over. The only way of attaining Lincoln's
proposed uniformity would be to abolish State legislatures, blot
out State sovereignty and merge the States into one consolidated
empire. But diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all their local and
domestic institutions was the great safeguard of their liberties.
He insisted on reverently bowing to the Supreme Court as the
authoritative expounder of the Constitution, rather than appealing
from it to a tumultuous town meeting where constitutional questions
arose. The Federal Government was founded on the white basis.
It was made by white men, for the benefits of white men, to be
administered by white men in such manner as they should determine.
Let each State decide for itself how it would treat the negroes
and let its neighbors alone.
"The issues between Mr. Lincoln and myself," he said, "are made
up, * * * *. He goes for uniformity in our domestic institutions,
for a war of sections, until one or the other shall be subdued. I
go for * * * the right of the people to decide for themselves. On
the other hand Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare on the Supreme Court.
* * * * I yield obedience to the decisions of that Court. * * *
* I am opposed to negro equality. I repeat that this nation is a
white people, * * * * a people that have established this Government
for themselves and their posterity. * * * * I am opposed to taking
any step that recognizes the negro man * * * as the equal of the
white man. I am opposed to giving him a voice in the administration
of the Government."
The reception was recognized by the politicians of both parties
as a great success. It was a brilliant opening of the senatorial
campaign. The Republicans were anxious to counteract it. On the
following evening Lincoln spoke at the same place. He had a large
and enthusiastic audience. But he was not an impromptu orator at
all comparable to Douglas. While his carefully prepared Springfield
speech was decidedly better than Douglas' dashing address in
Chicago, his unprepared speech was by no means equal to it. The
marked disparity between the two speeches must have intensified
the suspicion among Lincoln's friends that he was no match for his
rival on the stump.
On the 16th of July Douglas again spoke to a vast multitude at
Bloomington. He made an artful appeal for the Whig vote by a well
turned compliment to "Kentucky's great and gallant statesman, John
J. Crittenden," who proposed to refer the whole question back to
the people of Kansas and thus "showed himself a worthy successor
of the immortal Clay." The Republicans had "endorsed the great
principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill," they had "come to the
Douglas platform in supporting the Crittenden-Montgomery bill." The
compromise of 1850 embodied the principle that every people ought
to have the privilege of forming and regulating their own institutions
to suit themselves. Each State had that right and no reason existed
why it should not be extended to the Territories. The Illinois
House of Representatives by an almost unanimous vote had asserted
that the principle embodied in the measures of 1850 was the
birth-right of free men, the gift of heaven, a principle vindicated
by our Revolutionary fathers, that no limitation should ever be placed
upon it either in the organization of a territorial government or
the admission of a State into the Union. In conformity with that
principle he had brought in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for which
Lincoln and his friends were seeking his defeat.
"I have known Lincoln well," he said, "for a quarter of a century.
I have known him as you all know him, a kind-hearted, amiable
gentleman, a right good fellow, a worthy citizen, of eminent ability
as a lawyer, and, I have no doubt, sufficient ability to make a
good Senator."
He examined Lincoln's "house divided-against-itself" philosophy,
pointing out that the house had been divided for nearly seventy
years and still stood.
"How is Lincoln, if elected Senator, going to carry out that principle
which he says is essential to the existence of this Union; that
slavery must be abolished in all the States, or must be established
in all? * * * * He invites, by his proposition, a war between
Illinois and Kentucky, a war between the free States and the slave
States, a war between the North and the South, for the purpose of
either exterminating slavery in every Southern State, or planting
it in every Northern State. * * * * * What man in Illinois would
not lose the last drop if his heart's blood before he would submit
to the institution of slavery being forced upon us by the other
States against our will? * * * What Southern man would not shed
the last drop of his heart's blood to prevent Illinois or any other
Northern State from interfering to abolish slavery in his State? *
* * * I am opposed to organizing a sectional party which appeals to
Northern pride and Northern passion and prejudice against Southern
institutions, thus stirring up ill feeling and hot blood between
brethren of the same Republic. * * * * How is he to carry out his
principles when he gets to the Senate? Does he intend to introduce
a bill to abolish slavery in Kentucky? Does he intend to introduce
a bill to interfere with slavery in Virginia? How is he to accomplish
what he professes must be done to save the Union?
"There would be but one way to carry out his ideas. That would be
to establish a consolidated empire as destructive to the liberties
of the people and the rights of the citizen as that of Austria
or Russia or any other despotism that rests upon the necks of the
people * * * *. Who among you expects to live or have his children
live until slavery shall be established in Illinois or abolished in
South Carolina? * * * * There is but one possible way in which
slavery can be abolished and that is by leaving a State * * *
* perfectly free to form and regulate its institutions in its own
way. That was the principle upon which this Republic was founded.
* * * * Under its operation slavery disappeared from New Hampshire,
from Rhode Island, from Connecticut, from New York, from New Jersey,
from Pennsylvania, from six of the twelve original slave holding
States; and this gradual emancipation went on so long as we in the
free states minded our own business and left our neighbors alone,
* * * * so long as the free States were content with managing their
own affairs and leaving the South perfectly free to do as they
pleased. But the moment the North said, 'We are powerful enough to
control you of the South,' * * * * that moment the South combined
to resist the attack and thus sectional parties were formed and
gradual emancipation ceased in all the Northern slave holding States
* * *.
"Lincoln makes another issue, * * * * a crusade against the Supreme
Court of the United Sates because of its decision in the Dred Scott
case. * * * * I have no crusade to preach against that august
body. * * * * I receive the decision of the Judges of that Court
when pronounced as the final adjudication upon all questions within
their jurisdiction. * * * * Unless we respect and bow in deference
to the final decisions of the highest judicial tribunal in our
country, we are driven at once to anarchy, to violence, to mob law,
and there is no security left for our property or our own civil
rights. * * * * Are we to appeal from the Supreme Court to a country
meeting like this? * * * Does Mr. Lincoln intend to appeal from
the decision of the Supreme Court to a Republican caucus or a town
meeting? * * * He tells you that he is opposed to the decision in
the Dred Scott case. Well, suppose he is; what is he going to do
about it? I never got beat in a law suit in my life that I was not
opposed to the decision. * * * * This Government is divided into
three separate and distinct branches. * * * * Each one is supreme
within the circle of its own powers. The functions of Congress are
to enact the statutes, the province of the Court is to pronounce
upon their validity, and the duty of the Executive is to carry the
decision into effect."
Yet, he said, Lincoln wants to be elected Senator in order to
reverse the Dred Scott decision by passing another unconstitutional
statute. He can not get rid of the Judges now on the bench until
they die. He must first elect a Republican President by Northern
votes bound by pledges to appoint none but Republicans to the bench.
He must then persuade the Judges to die. The President must pledge
his new Judges in advance to decide this slavery question according
to the wishes of his party, regardless of the Constitution. What
confidence would the people have in a Court thus constituted?--a
Court composed of partisan Judges, appointed on political grounds,
catechized in advance and pledged in regard to a decision before
the argument and without reference to the state of facts? Would
such a Court command the respect of the country? Without regard
to the Dred Scott decision slavery will go just where the people
want it and not one inch further.
"I tell you, my friends, it is impossible under our institutions to
force slavery on an unwilling people. If this principle of popular
sovereignty * * * be fairly carried out by letting the people decide
the question for themselves by a fair vote at a fair election and
with honest returns, slavery will never exist one day or one hour
in any Territory against the unfriendly legislation of an unfriendly
people. I care not how the Dred Scott decision may have settled the
abstract question so far as the practical results are concerned. *
* * If the people of the Territory want slavery they will encourage
it by passing affirmatory laws and the necessary police regulations,
patrol laws and slave code; if they do not want it they will
withhold that legislation and by withholding it slavery is a dead
as if prohibited by a constitutional provision. * * * * * They
could pass such local laws as would drive slavery out in one day
or one hour, if they were opposed to it; and therefore, so far as
the question of slavery in the Territory is concerned, so far as
the principle of popular sovereignty is concerned in its practical
operation, it matters not how the Dred Scott case may be decided.
* * * * * Whether slavery shall exist or shall not exist in any
State or Territory will depend on whether the people are for or
against it; and which ever way they shall decide it will be entirely
satisfactory to me."
The Dred Scott case, he continued, decides that negroes are
not citizens. But Lincoln insists on conferring on them all the
privileges, rights and immunities of citizens. "I believe this
Government of ours was founded on the white basis. I believe
it was established for white men, of the benefit of white men and
their posterity in all time to come. I do not believe that it
was the design or intention of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence or the framers of the Constitution to include negroes
as citizens. * * * The position Lincoln has taken on this question
not only presents him as claiming for them the right to vote, but
their right under the divine law and the Declaration of Independence
to be elected to office, to become members of the legislature, to
go to Congress, to become Governors or United States Senators, or
Judges of the Supreme Court. * * * He would permit them to marry,
would he not? And if he gives them that right I suppose he will
let them marry whom they please, provided they marry their equals.
If the divine law declares that the white man is the equal of the
negro woman, that they are on a perfect equality, I suppose he admits
the right of the negro woman to marry the white man. * * * I do
not believe that the signers of the Declaration had any reference
to negroes when they used the expression that all men were created
equal. * * * They were speaking only of the white race. * * *
Every one of the thirteen colonies was a slave-holding constituency.
Did they intend * * * to declare that their own slaves were on an
equality with them? What are the negroes' rights and privileges?
That is a question which each State and Territory must decide for
itself. We have decided that question. We have said that in this
State the negro shall not be a slave but that he shall enjoy no
political rights; that negro equality shall not exist. * * * For
my own part, I do not consider the negro any kin to me nor to any
other white man; but I would still carry my humanity and philanthropy
to the extent of giving him every privilege and every immunity that
he could enjoy consistent with our own good."
Maine allows the negro to vote on an equality with the white man.
New York permits him to vote, provided he owns $250 worth of
property. In Kentucky they deny the negro all political and civil
rights. Each is a sovereign State and has a right to do as it
pleases. Let us mind our own business and not interfere with them.
Lincoln is not going into Kentucky, but will plant his batteries
on this side of the Ohio and throw his bomb shells--his Abolition
documents--over the River and will carry on the political warfare
and get up strife between the North and South until he elects a
sectional President, reduces the South to the condition of dependent
colonies, raises the negro to an equality and forces the South to
submit to the doctrine that a house divided against itself cannot
stand; that the Union divided into half slave States and half free
cannot endure; that they must be all free or all slave; and that,
as we in the North are in the majority, we will not permit them to
be all slave and therefore they in the South must consent to the
States being all free.
"These are my views and these are the principles to which I have
devoted all my energies since 1850, when I acted side by side
with the immortal Clay and the god-like Webster in that memorable
struggle in which the Whigs and the Democrats united upon a common
platform of patriotism and the Constitution. * * * And when
I stood beside the death-bed of Mr. Clay and heard him refer with
feelings and emotions of the deepest solicitude to the welfare of
the country, and saw that he looked upon the principle embodied in
the great Compromise of 1850, the principle of the Nebraska bill,
the doctrine of leaving each State and Territory free to decide
its institutions for itself, as the only means by which the peace
of the country could be preserved and the Union perpetuated. I
pledged him on that death-bed of his that so long as I lived my
energy should be devoted to the vindication of that principle and
of his fame as connected with it. I gave the same pledge to the
great expounder of the Constitution, he who has been called the
god-like Webster. I looked up to Clay and him as a son would to a
father, and I call upon the people of Illinois and the people of
the whole Union to bear testimony that never since the sod has been
laid upon the graves of these eminent statesmen have I failed on
any occasion to vindicate the principle with which the last great
crowning acts of their lives were identified. * * * And now my
life and energy are devoted to this work as the means of preserving
this Union. * * * It can be maintained by preserving the sovereignty
of the States, the right of each State and each Territory to settle
its domestic concerns for itself and the duty of each to refrain
from interfering with the other in any of its local or domestic
institutions. Let that be done, and the Union will be perpetuated.
Let that be done, and this Republic which began with thirteen
States and which now numbers thirty-two, which when it began only
extended from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, but now reaches to
the Pacific, may yet expand north and south until it covers the
whole continent and becomes one vast, ocean-bound Confederacy. *
* * * Let us maintain the great principles of popular sovereignty,
of State rights and of the Federal Union as the Constitution has
made it, and this Republic will endure forever."
On the following day he spoke at Springfield, repeating his
Bloomington speech with slight abridgment.
In the evening, Lincoln, who had attended Douglas' Bloomington meeting
and accompanied him to Springfield, spoke to a large audience. He
twitted him for his noisy, spectacular campaign, "the thunderings
of cannon, the marching and music, the fizzle-gigs and fireworks. * * *
"Does Judge Douglas," he asked, "when he says that several of the
past years of his life have been devoted to the question of popular
sovereignty and that all the remainder of his life shall be devoted
to it, mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing
to the people of the territories the right to exclude slavery? *
* * He and every one knows that the decision of the Supreme Court,
which he approves and makes a special ground of attack upon me for
disapproving, forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery.
This covers the whole ground from the settlement of a Territory
till it reaches the degree of maturity entitling it to form a State
Constitution. So far as all that ground is concerned, the Judge
is not sustaining popular sovereignty, but absolutely opposing it.
He sustains the decision which declares that the popular will of
the Territory has no constitutional power to exclude slavery during
their territorial existence. This being so, the period of time
from the first settlement of the Territory till it reaches the point
of forming a State Constitution is not the thing that the Judge is
fighting for; but, on the contrary, he is fighting for the thing
that annihilates and crushes out that same popular sovereignty. *
* * He is contending for the right of the people, when they come to
make a State Constitution, to make it for themselves and precisely
as best suits themselves. That is quixotic. Nobody is opposing or
has opposed the right of the people when they form a Constitution
to form it for themselves. This being so, what is he going to spend
his life for? Is he going to spend it in maintaining a principle
that nobody on earth opposes? Does he expect to stand up in
majestic dignity and go through this apothesis and become a god
in maintaining a principle that neither man nor mouse in all God's
creation opposes? * * * What is there in the opposition of Judge
Douglas to the Lecompton Constitution that entitles him to be
considered the only opponent to it, * * * the very quintessence
of that opposition? * * *
He in the Senate and his class of men there formed the number of
about twenty. It took one hundred and twenty to defeat the measure.
There were six Americans and ninety-four Republicans. Why is it
that twenty should be entitled to all the credit for doing that
work and the hundred to none? Does he place his superior claim
to credit on the ground that he has performed a good act that was
never expected of him? Perhaps he places himself somewhat on the
ground of the parable of the lost sheep which went astray upon the
mountains, and when the owner of the hundred sheep found the one
that was lost, there was more rejoicing over the one sheep that was
lost and had been found than over the ninety-and-nine in the fold."
In opposing the Dred Scott decision, he said, he was sustained by
the authority of Mr. Jefferson, who denounced the doctrine that the
Judges were the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions
as dangerous and tending to oligarchic despotism and insisted
that, while they were as honest as other men, they were not more
so, having the common passion for party, for power and the privilege
of their crops, and ought not to be trusted with the dangerous power
of deciding the great questions of State. The Supreme Court once
decided that the national back was constitutional. The Democratic
party revolted against the decision. Jackson himself asserted
that he would not hold a national back to be constitutional, even
though the Court had decided it to be so. The declaration that
Congress had not power to establish a bank was contained in every
Democratic platform since that time, in defiance of the solemn
ruling of the Court. In fact, they had reduced the decision to an
absolute nullity. And still Douglas boasted in the very speeches
in which he denounced others for opposing the Dred Scott decision
that he stood on the Cincinnati platform which repudiated and
condemned the old bank decision. He was for Supreme Court decisions
when he liked them and against them when he did not like them.
Would he not graciously allow the Republicans to do with the Dred
Scott decision what they did with the bank decision?
Springfield was Lincoln's home. He knew his audience and met it
with confidence. He now felt that he was Douglas' equal in the
field in which he had hitherto eclipsed all rivals.
But it was evident that the current was running with Douglas.
The great reception at Chicago had been a glorious opening. His
journeys through the State were triumphal processions. Special
trains, splendidly decorated, were at his service. Military
escorts received him with the firing of cannon and the loud music
of bands. He commanded and marshaled with the skill of a great
artist all the pomp and circumstance of victory. He owned much
property in Chicago, which with the growth of the city had greatly
increased in value. He mortgaged this for campaign funds, borrowing
eighty thousand dollars, a debt that harassed him to the grave.
Wealthy friends contributed freely and the campaign was run regardless
of expense.
Yet with all these advantages the contest was evidently a hard one.
Two years before, the combined Republicans and Whigs of the State
outnumbered the Democrats by nearly thirty thousand. The Whig party
was breaking up. It was a serious question of practical politics
whether they would drift to the Democrats or the Republicans.
Illinois comprised two utterly distinct communities. The northern
part of the State was settled by people from New England and the
Northwest. The Southern part was settled from Kentucky and the other
Southern States. The growth of Chicago and the rapid development
of the northern counties had made the State extremely doubtful
even for Douglas. To any other man his task was hopeless. In the
north the anti-slavery sentiment was strong, even to fanaticism,
and many of his own supporters prayed fervently for the arrival
of the day when slavery would be blotted from existence. In the
south, though slavery was prohibited by law, it was cherished in
the hearts of the people who remembered with warm affection the
old homesteads in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Lincoln had, with more frankness than discretion announced his views
on the great question. It was supremely important to compel Douglas
to explicitly declare himself, to hold him down to the dangerous
issue and force him to speak plainly. Each had the disadvantage
of pleasing one section of the State at the cost of offending the
other section. But Douglas was further embarrassed by the necessity
of avoiding offense to the slave holding States of the South. He
was a candidate not only for the Senate, but also for the Presidency.