This Day in Senate History (Randolph, Clay Meet in Duel)

Apr. 7, 1826—In a dense forest above a bridge in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac where they had carved out reputations as among America’s most eloquent and brilliant politicians, Secretary of State Henry Clay (pictured) and Senator John Randolph of Virginia met in an “affair of honor”—i.e., a formal, prearranged duel. After an exchange of ineffectual gunfire, the two stopped, smiled, and shook hands, their lives luckily preserved.

That outcome—shot at without result—was more common than the lethal kind. But not everyone was so fortunate as Randolph and Clay in those early days of the republic. The practice continued, despite laws forbidding it, the opposition of prominent Americans like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and high-profile fatalities that horrified an increasing portion of the country, including:

*Alexander Hamilton, shot by Vice-President Aaron Burr in Weehawken, NJ, in 1804;

*Naval war hero Stephen Decatur, killed by another commodore, James Barron, in 1820;

*Charles Dickinson, mortally wounded in 1806 by Andrew Jackson for having committed an especially unpardonable sin in the rising politician’s mind: insulting his wife Rachel;

*Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, dying in 1777 three days after being shot by political rival Lachlan McIntosh.

All four of those deaths resulted from gunfire—like most duels on American soil. Though challenged parties, as part of the so-called Code Duello rules informally regulating the practice, had the choice of weapons, these tended to be smooth-bore pistols, unlike the swords often used in Europe.

Attorneys and journalists were among the challenged parties. (Indeed, nearly four decades later, the young journalist Mark Twain had to be hustled out of Nevada for having written a satirical hoax—an experience he would memorialize several years later in “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel": “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me now, I would... take him kindly... by the hand and lead him to a quiet... spot, and kill him")

More often, politicians were in the line of fire, despite congressional rules on decorum in debate. That had seldom if ever stopped Randolph, who, as historian Henry Adams observed, had acted for the last 20 years like “the bully of a race course, was on the floor “ready at any sudden impulse to spring at his enemies, gouging, biting, tearing, and rending his victims with the ferocity of a rough-and-tumble fight.”

But Clay should have known better. Though normally cordial and ready to disregard slights, he’d already been involved with one duel 17 years before, with a fellow member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, Humphrey Marshall. An exchange of invective between the two had climaxed in a spitting match, then Clay’s challenge.

Three rounds of gunfire left both men slightly wounded before it was terminated. Nine years later, Clay gave signs that he’d learned his lesson about escalating quarrels when, as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, he introduced a resolution banning dueling.

What brought on Clay’s appointment with Randolph was the Virginian’s claim that the relationship between President John Quincy Adams and Clay amounted to a “puritan with the blackleg.” 

(There were two possibilities for the meaning of “blackleg,” neither complimentary: 1) a fatal disease affecting livestock; 2) an idiom carried over from Great Britain, signifying a cheating gambler or swindling—a reference to Clay’s penchant for wagering.)

Once again, Clay took offense enough to issue a challenge. This time, the duel was shorter—and with less contact to the body—than the one with Marshall. Both men’s first shots went awry. Clay’s second bullet went through Randolph’s coat near the hip, and the Virginian, after firing into the air, announced he would not continue.

“You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay,” Randolph joked, prompting Clay to reply, ‘I am glad the debt is no greater.”

Altogether the affair was, according to Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (who had seen and even participated in his share), the “highest toned” duel he had ever witnessed. Matters became so cordial between Randolph and Clay that, when the Virginian was dying, he insisted on being carried into the Senate to shake his old adversary’s hand before he expired.

Inevitably, a “what-if” scenario comes to mind about this duel: If Clay’s shot had found its mark against Randolph, would it have haunted the rest of his career, as Jackson’s had after meeting Dickinson? On the other hand, if Randolph hadn’t been wearing thick gloves that caused his pistol to discharge accidentally and then go wide, what might have happened to Clay?

The more important question might have been what would have happened to the United States. In Clay’s single term as Secretary of State, the department settled 12 commercial treaties—more than all five prior Presidential administrations combined—and built strong ties with the newly independent Latin American republics.

With his service to John Quincy Adams over, he ran unsuccessfully for President two more times, and arguably was more qualified for the office than any of its other occupants through the rest of his life. Back in the Senate, his advocacy for internal improvements and devotion to the Union (demonstrated in compromises that temporarily averted civil war) influenced the young Abraham Lincoln, who regarded him as his “beau ideal of a statesman.”

All of that would have been lost if Clay had fallen in his all-but-forgotten encounters with Humphrey Marshall and John Randolph.

This Day in Senate History (Robert Byrd Becomes Longest-Serving Member)

 

June 12, 2006—Having already occupied the most powerful leadership posts in the upper chamber of Congress, Robert Byrd surpassed Strom Thurmond as the longest-serving member in the history of the U.S. Senate. 

By the time he died four years later, at age 92, the Democrat from West Virginia had also become the longest-serving member in the history of Congress as a whole; had cast more votes than any other member; and had won an unprecedented ninth term for his office.

If Byrd had completed only his second, or even third, term as Senator, he might have been remembered far more negatively. In an entry for October 2, 1971 that was posthumously included in The Haldeman Diaries, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff for Richard Nixon, recorded that his boss, annoyed that a potential Supreme Court nominee, Richard Harding Poff, was withdrawing from consideration for a Supreme Court vacancy, had decided to “really stick it to the opposition now”:

“On the court, he came up with the idea of (Robert) Byrd of West Virginia because he was a former KKK’er, he’s elected by the Democrats as Whip, he’s a self-made lawyer, he’s more reactionary than Wallace, and he’s about 53.”

Byrd indeed was “a former KKK’er,” a recruiter and organizer in the 1940s (though never a Grand Wizard, as some recent GOP misinformation states), as well as an advocate for racial segregation and a supporter of the Vietnam War. 

But the need to secure votes among non-Southern colleagues for Senate leadership offices led him over the years to moderate old positions. Eventually, Byrd backed renewal of voting-rights legislation—a stance that won him praise from civil rights icon John Lewis and Barack Obama, the first African-American President—and he opposed both Ronald Reagan's aid to the contras in Nicaragua and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

As alluded to by Nixon, Byrd defeated the incumbent Democrat whip, Ted Kennedy, in 1971, shocking many political observers of the time. Thereafter he was elected twice as Senate Majority Leader. 

“I ran the Senate like a stern parent," Byrd recalled in his memoir, Child of the Appalachian Coalfields. He had little time for small talk or glad-handling, as, for instance, the convivial Kennedy had. But his mastery of Senate rules gave him an unrivalled ability to rack up votes.

Unsurprisingly, then, despite his reputation for oratory (with speeches often studded with references to Roman history or literature), Byrd made a more lasting mark as a legislative technician.

Sanford Ungar’s 1975 Atlantic Monthly profile demonstrated how Byrd structured (or restructured) the Senate business on his way up the hierarchy (including shortening the chamber’s “morning hour” and moderating who could speak on the floor). 

Were he alive today, Byrd might not recognize the political climate in either his native state or the Senate he had served so assiduously. Joe Manchin has been the only Democrat to hold a statewide office in the last four years, forcing him to tack to the right—a far cry from the days when Byrd regularly romped to landslide victories in the general election, or even ran unopposed. (Donald Trump took the state with nearly 69% of the popular vote in both the 2016 and 2020 Presidential races.)

Particularly during his two decades as chair or ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd earned the nickname “The King of Pork” for the enormous federal largesse he secured for West Virginia--$1.2 billion through the Senate from 1991 to 2006, largely due to his efforts, according to an analysis by the nonprofit group Citizens Against Government Waste.

Though the use of earmarks is now being revived in Congress, the odor of illegality and ethical misdeeds continues to cling to the practice a decade after its use was banned. That complicates Senators’ hopes of proving their value to constituents—and the bargaining leverage for complex, often controversial bills that prior Senate leaders like Byrd would have possessed.

Finally, one suspects that Byrd—an institutionalist who defended the use of the filibuster in the Senate—might have lifted his eyebrows, annoyed at how Ted Cruz and his GOP colleagues have weaponized the practice. Rather than totally ban the filibuster, however, Byrd would probably have tried to punish Cruz for his showboating—perhaps by using an arcane parliamentary rule to stall a pet project—while warning Democratic colleagues against outlawing a procedure that they might find handy to use someday, albeit less frequently.

This Day in Senate History (Birth of Eugene McCarthy, Democratic Primary Insurgent)

Mar. 29, 1916— Eugene McCarthy, a cool intellectual who, to nearly everyone’s surprise—including his own—ignited voter passion in one of the most turbulent years in American political history, was born in Watkins, Minn.

The recipient of the most rigorous education, McCarthy earned his undergraduate degree at St. John’s University, then was briefly a novice in the Benedictine Abbey His friend Senator Philip Hart of Michigan called him "a man out of his proper time, a man meant for the Age of Faith... when men like Thomas More could make their last defense, beyond the civil law, in religious belief." He was the only politician I can think of who could have argued with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention about Thucydides, Aristotle, Locke and Montesquieu, then run rings around them when the conversation turned to Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The friend of poets such as Robert Lowell, someone who could rattle off with little prompting hundreds of lines from William Butler Yeats, McCarthy also wrote verses that constitute some of the most intriguing of the 16 books he published in his lifetime. They fully vent his contrarian spirit, including these lines from the campaign that earned him a place in American political annals:

I am alone

in the land of the aardvarks.

I am walking west

all the aardvarks are going east.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was a cause he came late to, as he voted for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson virtually a blank check to escalate the conflict. But once he turned against the war, in 1966, he was all in, in a way that nobody else contemplated being. At a time when no other Democratic politician could be persuaded to test the President and his military policy at the polls, McCarthy took on an incumbent whose power derived in no small measure from vindictiveness against anyone who thwarted his will.

McCarthy did not win the 1968 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. But his 42% of the vote dismayed LBJ so much that the President announced he would not seek another term. The title of McCarthy's memoir of the Presidential campaign, The Year of the People, expressed his conviction that the feelings of the electorate, as reflected in the primaries, needed to be respected at the party’s convention. They weren’t—Hubert Humphrey ended up as the Democratic nominee, despite being too late to enter any primaries—but the need to contain the divisions exposed in these contests and at the convention led to major rule changes in both parties. (Eight years later, Ronald Reagan took his own challenge to a sitting President of his own party, Gerald Ford, all the way to the convention.)

The Minnesota Senator, then, posed the most consequential challenge to a sitting President and party bosses since ex-President Theodore Roosevelt ran against hand-picked successor William Howard Taft in the 1912 GOP primaries. Now, we have been living in a landscape transformed in his wake: instead of the steeplechase primary season of his “year of the people,” a seemingly permanent campaign.

This year, we have been witnessing another stormy, likely transformative primary season. But exactly which candidate fills McCarthy’s role, and how, is a matter of some dispute.

For instance, when I typed “Eugene McCarthy” AND Trump into Google, I came up with more hits on McCarthy and …Bernie Sanders. The high-toned style of Sanders does have more personality traits in common with McCarthy, another Senator critical of his party’s incumbent President, than the boorish Donald Trump does. But there, the similarities end.

When all is said and done, in the likelihood that Hillary Clinton beats Sanders, she will probably gain the support, however reluctantly granted, of his base. The same cannot be said of Trumpeters, however, who, if they walk out on the GOP convention in Cleveland, will sit out the general election, as many McCarthy supporters did in 1968.

At another level, there are some intriguing parallels between the McCarthy and Trump campaigns:

*Each candidate did not realistically expect to win their party’s nomination. Stephanie Cegielski, a strategist for the Make America Great Again super PAC, has claimed that Trump did not originally think he would win, but would have simply been satisfied to place second in the delegate count, virtually guaranteeing what he wasn’t granted at the 2012 GOP convention: a prominent speaking role. Similarly, McCarthy had unsuccessfully urged Bobby Kennedy to yield to the entreaties of the “Dump Johnson” movement by running, and even as he announced his candidacy he expressed the hope that RFK would eventually enter the race.

*Each man emerged as a protest candidate. While McCarthy’s insurgency was fueled by anger over Vietnam, Trump’s has occurred with a GOP electorate that has largely upended conservative orthodoxy on free trade, entitlements and immigration.

*Each was transformed by encounters with rivals, becoming far more bitter than expected. The current nastiness between Trump and Ted Cruz is all the more striking considering their bromance in the early season of the primaries. And once Kennedy did jump into the race after New Hampshire, now knowing he could not be accused of splitting the party, McCarthy regarded the move as an act of opportunism that would only divide the anti-war vote.To the end of his days, he spoke more bitterly about his assassinated rival for the antiwar vote than about the President the two were trying to replace, according to a retrospective by NPR's Ken Rudin after McCarthy's death in 2005 . (See my account of their final, fierce faceoff in the winner-take-all California primary.)

*Each rewrote the rules of campaigning by introducing new players into their party’s coalition. Ominously for Hillary Clinton, Trump has done well in crossover primaries that allow Democrats to vote Republican, especially with angry white males. These might be termed “Falling Down” ex-Democrats, after the Michael Douglas movie of that name. In 1968, thousands of young people went “clear for Gene”—trimming their long hair and appearing presenting—in stumping door to door for the candidate.

*The tensions of the campaigns found explosive release in violence. Although neither McCarthy nor Kennedy encouraged this, it seemed a constant specter hanging over the campaigns. We are already seeing something of a repetition of that today. Fights have been breaking out at Trump appearances, with his own campaign manager arrested for interfering with a female reporter. Trump has warned darkly of “riots” if he is denied the Republican nomination, and his expressed willingness to allow delegates to carry weapons at the convention not only creates a security nightmare, but also a threat to democratic procedures.

*In both campaigns, candidates’ wives were collateral damage from the combustible energies unleashed by the campaigns. The current fracas involving Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump might be more public, but McCarthy’s family suffered as well. Abigail McCarthy—every bit as intellectually formidable as her husband, and an ardent backer of what appeared initially to be a quixotic campaign—ended up being hospitalized three times while her husband was on the hustings—and, within a year of the campaign’s end, the two had separated as a result of Eugene’s affair with a journalist.

Stylistically, of course, McCarthy can be considered the antithesis of Trump: far more intellectual, less willing to pander shamelessly.

And, although it’s been said that Trump has hurled “insults” at opponents, he is really only peddling puny epithets that any eight-year-old can toss in a schoolyard. For a real insult, one that could have come from the 19^th-century golden age of American political invective, consider McCarthy's elegant jibe at George Romney, a prospective GOP world-beater forced from the race because of his gaffe that he had been “brainwashed" by the military on a trip to Vietnam. In the case of Romney, widely regarded as an intellectual lightweight, McCarthy observed that “a light rinse would have been sufficient." Similar remarks to Capitol Hill colleagues over the years led them to nickname him "The Needler."

At best unconventional, at worst merely quirky, McCarthy could exasperate observers by his unexpected advances into and retreats from the American political thickets. (Garry Wills: “Eugene McCarthy spent a good deal of his time trying to prove that he was too good for politics. What use was that? Most of us are too good for politics; but we do not make a career of demonstrating it.”) Nowadays, though, most people would die to be represented by someone who doesn’t stick slavishly to an ideology or party line but is interested in something more than politics.

This Day in Senate History (Robert Taft, Linchpin of Political Dynasty, Born)

September 8, 1889—Robert A. Taft, the middle figure in an Ohio family that, over five generations, held the highest offices in their state or the federal government, was born in Cincinnati. His dad, William Howard Taft, a state judge at the time, jovially wrote of his eight-pound son: “I am obliged to give judgment to those who contend that the boy is one of the most remarkable products of this century.”

The tragedy of Will Taft’s life was in winning the Presidency, an office he did not want; the tragedy of Robert’s was that he pursued the same office more aggressively without ever achieving it.

As much as he valued his forebears, Robert was also keenly conscious of the burden of the legacy. The family name, this leader of the conservative wing of the GOP noted, "supplies the impetus which gives a man his start, but that impetus does not last forever. After the start is made, it is only by his own effort that a man can keep going, and one with a family name has a lot to live up to."

The Tafts, while hardly perfect, managed to “live up to” the burden of public service without the shattering traumas endured by others. An article I came across on America’s top 10 political dynasties ranks the Tafts at only #7. But I would move them up at least several notches. Consider the principal figures in this remarkable family:

*Alphonso Taft (1810-1891), one of the founders of the Republican Party in Ohio, served as Attorney-General and Secretary of War in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, and later as U.S. minister to Austria-Hungary and Russia.

*William Howard Taft (1857-1930) did not immediately get his heart’s desire—appointment as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—because he wanted to see an important job (Governor-General of the Philippines) through, then later because, against his better judgment, he was persuaded by his wife to accept Theodore Roosevelt's anointing as his successor for President. What followed was the breakup of his friendship with TR, loss of his reelection bid in 1912, and a sundering of the Republican Party between its conservative and more moderate wings that has lasted the good part of a century.

*Robert Taft (1889-1953) did not won the nomination of his party in three tries, but he won the respect of Senate colleagues who nicknamed him “Mr. Republican” and elected him Senate Majority Leader.

*Robert Taft Jr. (1917-1993) also was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio.

*Robert (Bob) Taft III (1942-) served as governor of Ohio for two terms.  His no-contest plea to charges of accepting undisclosed gifts ended not only his own political career but also, in all probability, the extraordinary influence his family had exerted in the state over 150 years.

This post was originally intended as a “Quote of the Day,” which, given that Monday is the start of a workweek, I usually reserve for humor. I hoped to include a sample from Senator Taft. The closest I could find, from his statement opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend Lease program in February 1941, was the following:

“Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum—you certainly don’t want the same chewing gum back.”

If you don’t think the result displayed here ranks with Letterman, Fallon or Kimmel, too bad. Had I realized beforehand how arduous my self-imposed assignment would be—how many vast, deserted cybertracts I would have to traverse to come up with even this—I would never have taken it on.

Reading the statement from which this quote came, I doubt that Taft—admired by friend (and even foe) for his ferocious intellect and diligence—had a ghostwriter work on it. (At a time when this was becoming more the norm in Washington, he disdained the practice.) It’s filled with the kind of thoughtful, cogent constitutional arguments he would have made in college at Yale and Harvard Law School.

But I strongly suspect that Taft would have solicited opinions in order to come up with this line. Put it this way: if you were an overachiever in high school and college—if you were the son not only of a President but of a formidable First Lady—what are the chances you would have even touched chewing gum, let alone chewed it?

Actually, the quip reveals a great deal about Taft. He was looking to counter FDR’s folksy, effective line supporting Lend Lease: that the unusual deal between the U.S. and Britain would be like a hose used to put out a neighbor’s fire. But FDR’s metaphor was not out of place with either his normal way of talking or this statement in particular. Taft’s was, on both counts. I think that the electorate sensed this incongruity.

I’ve been thinking a good deal about Senator Taft lately as I struggle to make sense of how he might have fit in given our current political environment. In certain ways, the current hue and cry over GOP obstruction of the President’s program would have sounded awfully familiar to Taft.

From the moment he entered the Senate in 1939, there was hardly any aspect of FDR’s program, foreign or domestic, that he did not oppose. He not only saw the New Deal as a nightmare, but feared that the President’s crypto-interventionism would involve the United States in a bloody second world war.

It was just as bad with Truman, as Taft opposed (unsuccessfully) the creation of NATO and (successfully) the President’s health-care program.  The President took the measure of Taft and his other Republican opponents with jibes about the “Do-Nothing Congress”  en route to his 1948 re-election victory.

That fierce partisanship would have formed a bond between Taft and today’s GOP.

In other crucial senses, though, Taft would not have felt at home in today’s political world in general or the Republican Party in particular.

In interviews in advance of the premiere of his documentary series The Roosevelts later this month, director Ken Burns has indicated that neither Teddy nor Franklin Roosevelt could have achieved high office, given current political conditions. The same is even more true for Taft. 

Already by the time he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Taft’s dry, statistics-laden speeches did not lend themselves to the dominant medium of the age—radio—and he was at a distinct disadvantage against Franklin Roosevelt, the master of the fireside chat.

But by temperament as well, Robert Taft would have been an odd man out.  While the undisputed leader of conservatives (the same wing of the GOP that backed his father against Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive insurgency), he still was ready to stake out certain positions that cut no ice with his constituency: opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and backing of federal housing and aid to education. 

Whether one agrees or not with his opposition to the Nuremberg Trials, his reasoning--that the proceedings would constitute a dangerous precedent for "victors' justice"--could not have been more sincere. That stance, made in the teeth of great public disapproval, helped earn Taft a place in a bestselling book by a young senator who had only gotten to know the Majority Leader for a few months before the latter's death of cancer: John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.

Essentially secular by personal conviction as well as family conviction (his grandfather wrote a key precedent on prayer in the state, and his father’s Unitarianism became an issue, briefly and foolishly, in the 1908 campaign), Taft would have been out of step in today’s more evangelically-oriented GOP.

Deeply private, disdaining gladhanding while campaigning, Taft would also have felt that today’s 24-hour news environment was overly intrusive.

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.