Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

convention in one of his greatest speeches, the “House Divided” speech. At the very beginning, Lincoln hammered at the folly of expecting that popular sovereignty could resolve the sectional crisis:

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

He then attacked the notion that Douglas, the author of this failed policy, was now to be hailed as the adopted son of the Republicans. “They do not tell us, nor has he told us, that he wishes any such object to be effected,” Lincoln observed. Just because Douglas had a quarrel with Buchanan and Taney over popular sovereignty did not mean that he had become a Republican or, more to the point, an opponent of slavery. “How can he oppose the advances of slavery?” Lincoln asked, mimicking Douglas’s announcement that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or voted down in Kansas, so long as the vote was properly conducted. “He don’t care anything about it.”

To the contrary, Lincoln argued, the entire progress of events from Kansas-Nebraska up through Dred Scott showed that “don’t care” was merely a front, that everything in Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott had been prearranged deliberately to advance slavery, and that Douglas was as much as part of that conspiracy as Buchanan, Pierce, or Taney. “Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision,” Lincoln declared darkly.

When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting… we find it impossible to not 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.32

With that, Lincoln called upon Illinois Republicans to rally to his standard and display a united front against Douglas.

Douglas cast a wary eye on Lincoln, recognizing him as “the strong man of the [Republican] party—full of wit, facts, dates—and he is the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”33 Douglas’s best policy would have been to stay away from Lincoln and rely on his own enormous prestige in Illinois to carry him back to the Senate. But Douglas could never resist a fight when offered, and when Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates across the state, Douglas accepted—with the stipulation that the number of debates be set at seven and that Douglas be given the upper hand in rebuttals. The debates began on August 21 in Ottawa, Illinois, and ranged across the state to Freeport on August 27, Jonesboro on September 15, Charleston on September 18, Galesburg on October 7, Quincy on October 13, and Alton (where Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered twenty-one years before) on October 15.

Douglas’s plan for the debates was to paint himself as the champion of a white man’s democracy and Lincoln as an abolitionist fanatic whose opposition to popular sovereignty would let down Illinois’s barriers to black immigration. The “House Divided” speech, in Douglas’s hands, was the principal evidence that Lincoln was a reckless “Black Republican” partisan who wanted equal civil rights for blacks more than he wanted a stable and peaceful Union. “He tells you this Republic cannot endure permanently divided into Slave and Free states, as our fathers made it,” Douglas roared during the third debate. “Why can it not last, if we will execute the Government in the same spirit and upon the same principles upon which it is founded?” It would last just fine, Douglas insisted, if Lincoln and the Republicans would simply leave off trying to impose abolition on the South or upon the territories. “It can thus exist if each State will carry out the principles upon which our institutions were founded… the right of each State to do as it pleases, without meddling with its neighbors.” Giving each state active popular sovereignty over its affairs (and each territory passive popular sovereignty over its organization) was the only way to guarantee peace among the states. “There is but one path of peace in this Republic,” Douglas declared, “and that is to administer this Government as our fathers made it, divided into Free and Slave States.” The best signpost to that path was popular sovereignty, “allowing each State to decide for itself whether it wants slavery or not.”34

It mattered nothing to Douglas whether slavery itself was right or wrong, or whether there was a moral imperative that justified its restriction no matter what damage that requirement did to the rights of an individual state. If each state and territory were left to “settle the slavery question for herself, and mind her own business and let her neighbors alone… there will be peace between the North and South, and in the whole Union.” Lest this seem too much a triumph of political expediency over a question of morality, Douglas was quick to remind his white Illinois listeners of whom their moral discomforts were being lavished upon—the Negro, whose presence they loathed anyway. He asked them to suppose that slavery was wrong, and so wrong that restriction and abolition was the only cure: what would the result be for Illinois? “Do you desire to turn this beautiful State