This Day in New York History (Seward Senate Speech Marks Him as Prime Anti-Slavery Foe)

March 11, 1850—In his maiden speech as U.S. Senator, the New York Whig William H. Seward denounced the Compromise of 1850, an omnibus legislative package that eased secessionist sentiment in the decade before the Civil War. 

The phrase he coined—“a higher law than the Constitution”—thrust him to the forefront of opposition to slavery, proved a stumbling block to his Presidential ambitions, and posed an enduring question about the relevance of faith- and morality-driven action in American politics.

I doubt if one out of a thousand people who pass the statue accompanying this entry have stopped for more than a couple of seconds to think about its subject. Now in the midst of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s collective biography of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime cabinet, Team of Rivals, I’ve come to appreciate, maybe for the first time, the opponent-turned-friend of the President, and how much he contributed to the politics of his time, and even of what he means to ours.

As governor of New York in the early 1840s, Seward promoted economic and educational policies meant to open greater opportunities to African-, German- and Irish-Americans who were already forming part of the Democratic coalition. Like John McCain today, he excited a horde of noisome nativists to insane frenzies—in Seward’s case, through a proposal to divert a part of public school funds to parochial schools where Catholic immigrants would not have to worry about Protestant proselytizing. 

(Take note, today’s Republicans: the path to success lies away from fear-mongering about immigrants and the dispossessed. Take note, today’s Democrats: at least some of your “wall of separation” rhetoric about church and state derives from very poisonous roots.)

After a brief hiatus out of office, Seward came back to win a Senate seat, just in time to face the most divisive question of his time: the suddenly real possibility that divisions over slavery could spell the end of the Union.

The Compromise of 1850 was meant to forestall these questions by not giving either North or South entirely what each wanted. The North would get admission of California, almost certain to be a free state, and an end to the slave trade within Washington, D.C. Two other provisions favored the South: the creation of two territories in the Southwest, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery; and strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.

The squall over the Compromise of 1850 is usually remembered as the last hurrah of the Senate’s “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, all of whom would be out of the chamber they dominated, even dead, within three years. Webster’s three-hour March 7 oration in support of the package—an action that revolted his anti-slavery base and doomed his flickering Presidential chances but which also turned the tide toward enactment—was celebrated in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, and was long memorized by generations of American schoolchildren.

However, the extensive legislative debate, I would argue, also brought to the fore a new generation of political leaders who dominated the antebellum and Civil War eras. Jefferson Davis assumed the role of Calhoun (so ill that he could not read aloud his fiery speech opposing the bills) as spokesman for the South. Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” best remembered now for his debates later in the decade with Abraham Lincoln, acted, like Clay, as legislative magician by crafting the legislation and rounding up enough votes to ensure passage.

And Seward took on the part that Webster, in his zeal to preserve the Union, had relinquished: champion of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Beginning in a low voice decidedly removed from the great tolling bell that was Webster’s, he soon transfixed the Massachusetts Senator and his colleagues.

He could not support the proposals, he said. Strengthening the Fugitive Slave Law was unworthy of “true Christians or real freemen”; not just the slave trade, but slavery itself should not be permitted in the District of Columbia; and he could not abide the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.

Not only the spirit of the Constitution was incompatible with slavery, Seward claimed, but “there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same purposes. The territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe.”

Even though he lost this legislative battle, Seward became the foremost spokesman for free-soil forces in the Senate. But he had provoked so much fierce opposition in the South that his enemies began to approach his friends in number and vehemence.

Political mentor Thurlow Weed’s confession that Seward’s speech “sent me to bed with a heavy heart” proved all too prescient in 1860. With the Whig Party dead by then, Seward sought the Republican Party nomination for President. But his long public anti-slavery record left such a long public trail that it opened the door to a relative dark-horse candidate: Abraham Lincoln.

Seward’s loyal and able service as Lincoln’s Secretary of State is how posterity fundamentally recalls him, and it’s certainly not a bad claim on our attention. But the “higher law” that this usually affable, conciliatory statesman invoked has, in one fashion or another, convulsed American politics throughout the republic.

In one sense, Seward’s appeal derives from the concept of natural law that has found advocates from Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Jefferson. It also meshes with the theory of civil disobedience formulated by Henry David Thoreau only a year before the Seward speech and perfected as a political tool by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 20th century.

But a “higher law” also has the potential of angering people who might not share one’s religious faith or even notions of morality. Applied to certain issues—Prohibition, abortion—it has polarized the American electorate for decades.

And yet, it would be a mistake to call, as some have done in this election year, for the marginalizing of moral calls to action in the political arena. Refusal to appeal to morality produces consequences in the populace that necessarily reflect the Darwinian atmosphere of politics. Does anyone think that the United States would have been a better nation without the backing that the civil rights movement received from African-American ministers or that the unionists gained from the Roman Catholic Church?

Quote of the Day (Mary Todd Lincoln, Bolstering Her Husband’s Confidence)

“You've no equal in the United States."—Mary Todd Lincoln, to her husband Abraham, quoted in Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln (1928)

Mary Todd Lincoln—born 200 years ago today in Lexington, Kentucky—is easily the most tragic of America’s First Ladies, and among the most complicated and controversial. Her extravagant spending, frequent bouts of temper, and consuming grief over the deaths of two of her sons represented another cross to bear for a President already struggling with a war of unparalleled challenges and carnage. 

After her husband’s assassination and a third son’s death, her last surviving child, Robert, sought to confine her to an insane asylum. Ever since, historians have debated the nature and extent of her afflictions.

Much of this has seeped, in a general way, into the public consciousness. But, for all the heartache she might have added to Abraham Lincoln’s incredible burden in the Civil War, she contributed enormously to his rise in American politics. Lincoln’s gifts were such that he still might well have gained the Presidency without her, but, as his law partner John Stuart noted afterward, it was her “fire, will and ambition” which made it a certainty.

Of all the actresses who have played Mrs. Lincoln—including Sally Field, Penelope Ann Miller, Mary Tyler Moore, and Julie Harris—the one who best captured this often-forgotten drive on behalf of her husband, I think, was Ruth Gordon in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. 

In fact, Gordon’s performance ( a far cry from his Oscar-winning role as a dotty old witch in Rosemary's Baby) may be the best element in the 1940 Presidential biopic starring Raymond Massey in the title role. That adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play may have exaggerated Abraham’s diffidence, but Mrs. Lincoln might have recognized much of herself in Ms. Gordon onscreen: flirtatious, talkative, vivacious, sarcastic, driven, shrewd, outspoken, politically astute, and well-educated.

The last quality is especially important. Her father, Robert Smith Todd, a merchant, lawyer, and Kentucky politician, recognizing his daughter’s aptitude for learning, sent her to the best schools that a young woman of the time could attend. 

All of this meant that she could talk to any male on any subject, which she proceeded to do. As the “belle of the town” in Springfield (where she was visiting her sister), she could have had her pick of any of the numerous men drawn to her flame (including a rising politician and her husband’s future rival for the U.S. Senate and Presidency, Stephen A Douglas). 

The unlikely winner of her hand was an ungainly attorney who shared with her a passion for Whig politics, a hero in Henry Clay, a flashing wit, and a love of poetry: Abraham Lincoln.

In the nearly two decades between their marriage in 1842 and the start of Lincoln’s Presidency in 1861, Mary:

*handwrote his letters to Whig leaders soliciting appointive positions, after his single term in Congress ended in the late 1840s;

*advised him to turn down an appointment as territorial governor of Oregon, correctly noting that it would remove him from the epicenter of American politics;

*kept her husband’s faith alive that his political career would revive in the decade that followed;

*attended sessions of the Illinois legislature, where she noted members’ party affiliation and stances on the Kansas-Nebraska Act—key metrics as her husband sought election to the U.S. Senate through that body; 

*bolstered Abraham’s anti-slavery feelings with her own abolitionist sentiment (doubly unusual in that she was raised in a family of slaveholders);

*spoke to reporters in the 1860 Presidential election, at a time when candidates’ wives were expected to keep quiet.

On the bicentennial of her birth, we should not only try to better understand this beleaguered First Lady, but also pay tribute to her for recognizing, before America and the world caught on, the immeasurable value of her husband.

This Day in Senate History (Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln Rival and Union Supporter, Born)

April 23, 1813--Stephen A. Douglas, “The Little Giant” who became the most significant political rival of fellow Illinois resident Abraham Lincoln, was born in Brandon, Vt. 

His status as one of history’s best-known famous also-rans means that unfortunately, on the bicentennial of his birth, little attention will be paid to how he fueled his adopted state’s enormous commercial growth, how he promoted the transcontinental expansion of America, and how his formidable speaking skills pushed his opponent to reach the top of his game.

If you’ve seen any Lincoln biopic that takes the future Great Emancipator up to his first inauguration, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Douglas, in at least one scene. Indeed, he made for an ideal cinematic foil to Lincoln. 

On the stump, the short, stocky senator, once described as a "a steam engine in breeches,” dominated by his violent language and gestures, while Lincoln would slowly unwind his argument the way he would his lanky frame. Even love marked the two men as rivals, since, it appears, Douglas courted the young Mary Todd around the same time that Lincoln—more successfully--did.

In a prior post, I described how, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates that highlighted their 1858 race for the U.S. Senate, the Republican challenger, in effect, lost the battle but won the war. By responding affirmatively to Lincoln’s crafty question on whether a majority of a territory could exclude slavery, Douglas alienated Southern voters in the Presidential race two years from then. 

With another candidate dividing the votes of the Democratic Party, Lincoln was able to win the Presidency in November 1860.

The two men had been taking each other’s measures since 1834, as first-term members of the Illinois General Assembly. They had frequently been at odds, especially over slavery (Lincoln opposed the expansion of the “peculiar institution” into territories, while Douglas figured, through his doctrine of popular sovereignty, that the controversy would abate through political compromise). 

But by March 1861, when secession loomed, the two united against this mortal threat to the republic. Douglas had only a few months to live, but he displayed during that time his best qualities, including a passion for the welfare of his country.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by a story told in The Modern Researcher, by John A. Garraty and Henry Graff, about one historian’s strenuous efforts to verify an anecdote in the anonymously published The Diary of a Public Man concerning Douglas at Lincoln’s first inauguration. 

Lincoln had no room on his tiny table to hold his stovepipe hat, the story went, so Douglas, sitting on the dais, graciously took the headgear and held it throughout the long ceremony.

Garraty and Graff, following this historian’s lead, believed that the incident probably didn’t happen. Other scholars more recently have concluded that it did. 

Part of the reason for the intense interest in this anecdote, I think, is that it tells us something fundamental about America’s fondest wishes for their politicians: that, despite their ambitions and clashing visions for the nation, they will display respect and grace at the most solemn ceremonies involving this country’s civil religion.

As it happens, there is at least a grain of truth to the story, in that the two came together to face a danger bigger than their decades-old rivalry. They met again, several weeks after the inauguration, as Lincoln was even more beleaguered than before, with several more Southern states joining the rebellion against the federal government when Fort Sumter was fired upon.

It’s interesting to speculate on the course of this conversation. 

Did the President uncork the kind of out-of-left-field joke told in Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln? 

Did they touch in any way on the major form of transportation they had both come to champion, the railroad--Lincoln as one of their most skilled legal advocates, Douglas as a longtime tireless Senate voice for a transcontinental railroad terminating in Chicago? 

Did the two engage in small talk about their days as lawyers in Illinois, or the towns they visited during their Senate debates? 

Did they commiserate over parents lost in childhood, and children (and, in the case of Douglas, a wife) dead more recently? 

Could they see, in the moments of silence between the jokes and the small talk, the affliction that the other endured because of  early disorder and subsequent sorrows? (Lincoln suffered from depression, while Douglas had taken to stronger quantities of alcohol.)

We don’t know exactly what was said or happened that day, except that Lincoln set aside several hours from his frenetic schedule for the meeting. 

By the end of it, Lincoln eagerly seized Douglas’ offer of support to help preserve the Union. Could Douglas go on a speaking tour in the Midwest and border states in an attempt to keep them in the Union? Douglas agreed to try.

Douglas threw himself into the Union cause with his usual customary energy, but exhaustion—and his years of heavy drinking—caught up with him. 

He died of typhoid at his home in Chicago, only 48 years old, disappointed in nearly every way one could imagine: his hopes for the Presidency gone, his financial resources so depleted that his widow had a tough time surviving for a while after his passing, and even his dream of a united, sea-to-sea republic—“Young America,” the movement was called—in jeopardy.

In time, of course, Lincoln would preserve the Union, enabling that the nation to which he and Douglas gave their “last full measure of devotion” would endure. In this, as in their public ambitions and private agonies, they had more in common that they realized for much of their lives.

This Day in Congressional History (Kansas-Nebraska Act Passed in Haste)

May 26, 1854—His legislation had already passed one key hurdle at an hour even more unearthly, so Stephen A. Douglas didn’t mind the lengths he had to go to this time.

At 1:15 in the morning, after an extension of a session from the prior day, the Illinois Senator and Presidential hopeful watched as a Joint Committee of Congress voted to approve his Kansas-Nebraska Act.

A word of advice to politicians: never decide anything important in the wee hours of the morning, when you’re exhausted, hungry and maybe even a bit liquored-up. George McGovern settled on Thomas Eagleton as his running mate at a similar hour, and we know how that turned out.

(Or maybe some of us don’t or have forgotten, given the disasters involving more recent Veep candidates—so, a fast recap: After fighting tooth and nail all the way to the floor of the convention for the nomination—and after having had, oh, at least a half dozen other people turn him down—McGovern offered the running-mate spot to Eagleton. When asked by a McGovern aide if he had any “skeletons in the closet,” the Missouri senator—a fine man, by most accounts—intrepreted the question a bit narrowly as referring solely to political corruption, and said no. He did not mention his past hospitalizations because of depression, and the McGovern campaign had no time to check even if it wanted to. The result: hysteria over a medical condition that undoubtedly afflicted more politicians than anyone realized at the time, then McGovern reversing his statement that he was “1,000 percent” behind his running mate and asking Eagleton to resign from the ticket. In other words, the most disastrous Veep choice until George W. Bush’s Veep-vetter, Dick Cheney, managed to turn up "skeletons in the closet" on all Bush’s other choices until, magically, there was nobody left but himself.)


Now, if you had told those assembled, on that day in the antebellum republic, that dire consequences would follow an affirmative vote, they might or might not go along with you. So, I think you’d have to spell it out for them:

* a region that rivaled 20th-century Beirut and Baghdad in violent mayhem;
* a Union torn asunder by the legislation;
* millions dead in the resulting Civil War; and
* lingering sectional discord and racism that would linger for generations afterward.

And, for those of a particular partisan stamp: anger over the measure led to the rise of the Republican Party.

Douglas must have thought his Presidential stock has soared after approval of the measure, which, before final passage, had already passed a key 5 am affirmative vote by the Senate. The act put into law the doctrine of popular sovereignty originally proposed by General Lewis Cass in the 1848 Presidential election, then championed by Douglas himself. The doctrine stipulated that the issue of slavery would be decided by territorial voters themselves.

Agitation over slavery was exactly what Douglas did not want. As an early proponent of manifest destiny, he envisioned an America stretching from sea to sea, bound together by all kinds of internal improvements—roads, canals, and railroads. He was particularly passionate on the last subject, and his desire to have a railroad built might have led him to change the bill in committee enough to bring matters to a boil about it in the North.

He could not help but notice that support for his idea of a transcontinental railroad with its eastern hub in Chicago--the major city in his home state--was thin in the South. If he could give the South something it really wanted on something else, he might be able to move this issue forward.

After a meeting with President Franklin Pierce—a Northern sympathetic to the South—and his Secretary of War, the southerner Jefferson Davis, Douglas redrafted his bill, stating explicitly what he had hoped to fudge: that the Missouri Compromise that had governed territorial admittance to the Union for the last 30 years was superseded by the bill. This meant that, if the voters decided it, slavery could be permitted north of the latitude that had prevailed before this.

Another key change occurred in the revised bill: the territory, once simply known as Nebraska, would now be split into two: Nebraska, the northern half, and Kansas, the southern part.

Reaction in the North was furious. The Missouri Compromise had meant that slavery could be confined. Now that was no longer the case. Moreover, the proximity of Kansas to Missouri, a slave state, meant that slaveowners could far more easily populate it than anti-slavery forces could.

At one point in the debate on Capitol Hill, Salmon P. Chase--himself a future Presidential aspirant--accused Douglas of pushing the bill to further his hopes for the White House. In the course of the angry exchange between the two, the phrase "corrupt bargain" was used.

Virtually nothing could cause greater anger to Douglas. As a strong partisan of Andrew Jackson, he knew that this term had been used to describe how John Quincy Adams had snatched the Presidency from Old Hickory: by appointing Henry Clay as his Secretary of State, thereby swinging the latter's key votes when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. The "corrupt bargain" charge had bedeviled Adams throughout his single term and had helped elect Jackson President.

Two little men were responsible for passage of the bill that caused such big problems for America.

One was Douglas himself, nicknamed “the Little Giant” to emphasize his outsized impact on the republic in the 1850s. He was at once the best-known and most controversial politician in America at this time. The “great triumvirate” of Clay, Webster and Calhoun had grabbed the headlines, as they always did, in the debate over the Compromise of 1850, but it was Douglas who was the legislative mechanic behind that omnibus bill. He was short—only five feet four inches—but on the stump, shouting, gesticulating, working his stocky frame into a sweat, he looked like a prize fighter.

Douglas boasted about his own critical role in the legislation: "I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men, and guarding from attacks, and with a ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise."

The second little man was Alexander H. Stephens, a sickly congressman who weighed no more than one hundred pounds. He resembled a 20th-century Georgian, Senator Richard Russell, in being a lonely lifelong bachelor who spent much of his time out of the office mastering congressional rules and regulations.

On May 22, just when it appeared the legislation was on the ropes, Stephens, a supporter of the bill, invoked Clause 119 of the House Rules—a clause that hardly anybody ever bothered with—to keep it alive after an unfavorable committee vote. After the Joint Committee of Congress pulled its midnight-oil act, the bill went to Pierce, who signed it four days later.

A big mistake all around. Racist Northerners who once denounced abolitionist agitation now found that slavery might not be excluded in any territory to which they might journey—and that, at a stroke, this undercut the value of their own labor.

In his Life and Times (1881), Frederick Douglass recalled how the measure “made abolitionists of people before they became aware of it, and…rekindled the zeal, stimulated the activity, and strengthened the faith of our old anti-slavery forces.” In his newspaper, Douglas himself called for “companies of emigrants from the free States” to be “collected together—funds provided” and to be “sent out to possess the goodly land, to which, by a law of Heaven and a law of man, they are justly entitled.”

The act also brought back onto the political scene a lanky lawyer, well-known to both Douglas and Stephens, who’d been in a five-year funk after he’d left the House of Representatives: Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had been on friendly terms with fellow Whig Congressman Stephens and he knew Douglas well from Springfield (Douglas’ friendliness toward Mary Todd led some to surmise that he was a beau of Lincoln’s future wife, though no real evidence has ever substantiated this).

Lincoln was catalyzed by his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, a fellow lawyer, T. Lyle Dickey, later remembered that Lincoln, upon hearing news of the passage of the bill, had “discussed the political situation far into the night” with him. That fall, upon hearing a three-hour defense of the act by Douglas at the State Fair, Lincoln leaped to his feet at its conclusion to announce to the crowd that he would deliver a rebuttal the next day.

A speech two weeks later at Peoria was even more powerful, laying out how the Founding Fathers had tried to inhibit the spread of slavery—and how the act now threatened to upset this careful moral and political balance. It served notice that Douglas would have a powerful rival on the local and national scene.

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.