Monday, October 13, 2008

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Skins Douglas in Sixth Debate)


October 13, 1858—In the riverfront town of Quincy, Ill., Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen A. Douglas for the sixth of seven times, putting the Illinois incumbent senator on the defensive and denouncing slavery as “a moral, a social and a political wrong.”

Legend has turned the Lincoln-Douglas debates into an almost impossibly high-minded consideration of constitutional questions. In reality, as Fergus Berdowich demonstrates in a marvelous recent article from Smithsonian Magazine, the debates were “characterized by substantial amounts of pandering, baseless accusation, outright racism and what we now call "spin."

Sounds like a summary of the recent McCain-Obama debates—or, for that matter, any of these forensics clashes dating back to Kennedy and Nixon back in 1960.

A Rivalry’s Culmination
Students of American history, of course, see the debates as a prelude to the more epic 1860 Presidential campaign—which, of course, Lincoln won. In another sense, however, I think it can be seen as a culmination of a two-decade rivalry between the two men—both fiercely talented, ferociously ambitious lawyer-politicians of the same generation who had come to Illinois in the same decade to make their way up the ladder.

As far back as May 1838 (no, that’s not a misprint), Lincoln had debated Douglas, who at the time was running for Congress against the gangly young attorney’s friend and law partner, John T. Stewart. A dozen years later, much to his dismay, after a single term in Congress, Lincoln’s political career appeared to be over, while Douglas had ascended to the Senate, where he quickly established a reputation as a legislative magician. (Though Henry Clay and Daniel Webster grabbed the public spotlight as the chief advocates of the Compromise of 1850, it was Douglas who pieced together the complex omnibus bill that sought to stave off disunion by giving North and South something of what they wanted.)

By 1852, Lincoln found himself hopelessly behind Douglas. “Time was when I was in his way some; but he has outgrown me & [be]strides the world; & such small men as I am, can hardly be considered worthy of his notice; & I may have to dodge and get between his legs."
Within two years, he had done so. Another Douglas piece of legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, provoked Lincoln—by now a prosperous but restless railroad lawyer—out of the political wilderness. Three times in 1854, he spoke out against the act, either immediately before or after Douglas had appeared on the same stage. He had become the long shadow that the senator could no longer escape.

Acidic Accusations of Abolitionism
The tone and momentum of this sixth debate contrasted sharply with the first and third, when Douglas threw the rhetorical equivalent of haymakers at his Republican opponent. The thrust of these accusations was that Lincoln was not just a secret abolitionist but a supporter of equal rights across the board for blacks—the right to vote, to sit on juries, to run for office, among others.

What was so objectionable about that? Well, in the mid-19th century, that line of argument was beyond the political pale—sort of like the GOP tagging the 1972 McGovern Democrats as being the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion.” If you want a sense of the visceral shock of this type of accusation, remember Huckleberry Finn’s horror that he might be considered an abolitionist for helping the slave Jim escape.

But if abolitionism wasn’t the dominant political force in the North at this point, then how come, only a year later, did that region react so angrily to the death of John Brown? Here, it helps to distinguish between abolitionism—the immediate, unconditional end of slavery and discrimination in America—and the free-soil movement, which sought to prevent slavery from expanding further. The primary aim of this latter group was “free-white labor,” which was deemed essential to a democratic republic. The latter group, considered more politically viable than abolitionism, provided the greater impetus for the creation of the modern Republican Party when the Whigs split over slavery.

The “Free Soil” adherents regarded blacks as a weapon to undercut their jobs and wages, in much the same way that the American labor movement for a long time saw immigrants as potential scabs. The Free Soil movement, then, could –and often did—embrace racist thinking.

Douglas’ thrusts at Lincoln as an abolitionist, then, were so devastating that the Rail Splitter had to resort to racial pandering of his own. In the fourth debate at Charleston, Lincoln came out with the statement that continues to be cited by contemporary white supremacists and leftist historians alike as evidence that he was fundamentally racist:


“I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people, and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."


It was a low moment in Lincoln’s campaign and career. But the following week he rebounded. At this point, it might be helpful to review the respective debating strategies of Senator Douglas and his opponent.

If either candidate might be said to resort to simple statements, endlessly repeated—a form of the modern soundbite campaign, if you will—it was Douglas. If you want to come down to the difference between the two men—and, revisionist thinking to the contrary, this difference was fundamental rather than merely rhetorical—it was this Douglas statement in the third debate: “I hold that this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and none others." The cadences make this a far more sinister counterpart to Lincoln’s more famous—and infinitely more generous and moral—formulation in the Gettysburg Address of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Lincoln, on the other hand, conceived of the debates less as tactics than as part of an overall strategy. He wanted to expose as a fraud Douglas’s notion of popular sovereignty – i.e., allowing the voters themselves to vote slavery up or down. Second, though abolitionist and desegregation were political non-starters, Lincoln thought he saw an opening in another area in which he could speak from the greatest depth of his conviction.

The Republican had begun to find his range at Galesburg a week earlier, but now in Quincy he truly opened fire on Douglas and the evils of slavery. I don’t think it was coincidental that Lincoln came to find his voice here.

Speaking From Personal Experience
I mentioned earlier that Quincy was a river town. Across the Mississippi lay Missouri, a slave state. It could not help bring to Lincoln’s mind the most visceral encounters with slavery that made him detest the institution for the rest of his life, as he came to view slaves going downriver with vast pity.

When he spoke now, it was in the simple speech of a man who believed, in the deepest part of his being, in the right of any make to make his way in life, no matter how humble his original circumstances: “In the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he (the slave) is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man," Lincoln declared.

Second, he denounced Douglas for joining President James Buchanan in a “conspiracy to make slavery national.” In truth, this was a bit unfair to Douglas, who, as a future Presidential contender and opponent of the excesses of pro-slavery forces in Kansas, had run afoul of Buchanan. (The ambivalent Douglas-Buchanan relationship holds just as much tension and historical interest as that between two other pairs of Senate hopefuls and sitting Presidents: Robert F. Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson and John McCain-George W. Bush.)

Nevertheless, Lincoln was onto something as far as Buchanan was concerned. By his inauguration day the year before, Buchanan had secretly polled some associates on the Supreme Court to learn that body’s decision in the controversial Dred Scott case. He threw his support behind the decision. So many Southerners served in Buchanan’s administration that it was fatally divided as he sought to prevent secession.

The strain of the debates—three-hour marathons each in a concentrated period of two months—began to tell on Douglas in this sixth encounter with Lincoln. He had come down with bronchitis, and it didn’t help that he enjoyed alcohol so much. He did not prove as agile as Lincoln in either this debate or the last one a week later.

Though Lincoln had lost this battle (Senate elections were then decided by state legislatures rather than directly by voters), he had won the war. The debates had made him a national celebrity and a credible candidate for President two years hence. At the same time, by maneuvering Douglas into a defense of popular sovereignty that angered the slaveholding South, he ensured that “the Little Giant” would not have a united Democratic Party behind him when he ran for President in 1860.

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