1858 (20 page)

It was an exhausting campaign. The two candidates, traveling mostly by train, had maintained a hectic schedule all summer. Douglas tried to speak in a different town every single day of the summer, reaching small hamlets by carriage, stagecoach, or river packet if they were not located near a train stop. He would not cancel speeches because of train delays or unruly weather. Once his 10:40 p.m. train did not arrive at its destination until 3:30 a.m., but he waited for it, boarded it, and, with little sleep, hit the campaign trail again at 6:00 a.m. when it reached its next stop. “Senator Douglas is taxing his strength severely, but it does not seem to impair his health,” wrote a reporter for the
Chicago Times
.
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Lincoln was just as busy. By November, each candidate had delivered one hundred speeches. Between them, by carriage, steamboat, and train, they had traveled more than ten thousand miles. The Senate race, and its debates, became historic. It was the first Senate race in U.S. history in which both sides hired stenographers (Robert Hitt, James Sheridan, and Henry Binmore), skilled at shorthand, to record the debates, word for word, for publication in the state’s newspapers (although both parties later complained that the stenographers missed words or entire phrases and took what the candidates said out of context).
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It was a colorful campaign full of heated debates, rousing speeches, huge and colorful banners that hung across city streets, thousands of broadsides, tens of thousands of pamphlets, raucous torchlight rallies, songs and poems written especially for the contest, and seemingly never-ending parades that snaked their way through large cities and small villages with equal enthusiasm. It was a campaign that was dominated by the great issue of the day: slavery. It also involved one of the most important political leaders in the country, Douglas, whose re-election would, all assumed, guarantee him the Democratic nomination for president in 1860 (some newspapers were already calling it “the great battle of the next presidential election”). And it was a campaign, Illinois residents insisted to eastern reporters who did not know much about him, that would introduce the little-known Abe Lincoln to the country.
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Politics had always been tricky in Illinois. The state’s residents would vote for one party’s presidential candidate and then the other’s for the Senate and House. One party would win national races and the other state contests. There was a heavy Chicago vote that was very different in its composition than the vote in the rest of the state. The southern section of Illinois that bordered on slave states was like a different country than the northern part; the Free-Soil candidates did poorly there in both 1852 and 1856. As an example of the southern leanings of the geographical sections of Illinois, a proposal to hold a convention to permit slavery in the state received the approval of just 23 percent of the voters in northern Illinois, 41 percent in central Illinois, and 62 percent in southern Illinois. Parts of the state were industrial and others were agricultural. Illinois had a large German population, which often voted for its own immigrant interests, as well as a substantial Irish and Swedish population. It was a great railroad and transportation center, whose workers sided with politicians who favored bills to help their industry.
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Both Lincoln and Douglas fretted about Illinois, especially Lincoln. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party in the state. He understood first-hand the intricacies of campaigning on national issues there. In 1856, the Republicans did well in congressional elections, capturing several seats, and in the statewide races they won over 40 percent of the legislative districts. Yet the 1856 presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, who should have run as well as the others on the ticket, lost the state. His pattern of votes was unbalanced too, and this alarmed Lincoln as he prepared for his Senate race. Fremont did well in the northern part of the state, but won a meager 23 percent of the votes in the south and just 37 percent in the central section. Lincoln would lose the election if he captured a similar vote in the central and southern sections of the state.
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Always a man who learned from the mistakes of others, he targeted the critical central counties; half the debates were scheduled there—Quincy, Alton, Charleston. That’s where he had to stop the Democrats. Wrote a reporter for the
Chicago Daily Democrat
, “The Republicans will sweep the North. The Democrats will sweep the South. Douglas hopes to get his balance of power in the center of the state…his only chance is to hold the balance of power [there]…”

The eleven counties in the central section of the state were evenly split between the Democrats and Republicans and a swing of just a few hundred votes there could determine the entire race. The vote was so close that in the 1856 state races in those eleven counties, the Republicans won 19,344 votes and the Democrats won 19,122. Lincoln had a plan to succeed in the central counties. He insisted that the party support Owen Lovejoy, an abolitionist and the brother of Elijah Lovejoy, a murdered newspaper editor, to win antislavery votes. He put together a strong German-based campaign organization.

It was there, beginning in 1856, that the Illinois Central Railroad expanded its lines deep into the heart of Illinois. To attract residents who would use the line, the railroad sold one million acres of land near the tracks in the central part of the state to settlers they attracted through newspaper ads. About half were transplanted New Englanders, who tended to be liberals, and the other half were newly arrived German immigrants. The Germans numbered over 300,000 by 1858, one-fifth of the state’s population; no one was certain how they would vote.
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Lincoln started a large voter registration drive. The Republicans learned that new voters tend to join new parties and vote for new candidates. The Republicans had been successful in amassing large numbers of registered voters who supported them in Illinois. The party registered 133,000 voters in 1854, its first official year, and then increased that to 238,000 in 1856. They sought even more members in 1858. He strengthened his relationships with all of the Republican newspaper editors in the state.
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But Lincoln had problems, too. Several national Republicans, led by
New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley, actually wanted to have Douglas elected on a fusion ticket because they now saw him as an antislavery champion. Lincoln, if elected, would have no influence in Washington, but the famous Douglas would. A Douglas landslide would also ruin Buchanan and pave the way for the Republicans to capture the presidency in 1860.

Lincoln complained bitterly about their efforts to support the Democrat. He wrote of the powerbrokers in his party who talked about Douglas, “Have they concluded that the Republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois?” He wrote later that those who thought so highly of Douglas would have been disappointed in him and if they were stuck with him in office, they would “cut their own throats.” He argued that Douglas did not care whether anyone had slavery, and that supporting Douglas or Buchanan would be “to reach the same goal by different roads.” He wrote that if the Republicans had turned to Douglas, “The Republican cause would have been annihilated in Illinois and…everywhere for years, if not forever.”

And then there were the leftover antislavery American Party voters, the former Know-Nothings, and disgruntled Whigs, who had made such an impact in the 1856 elections. In 1858, the Douglas Democrats worked hard to win their support. Lincoln wrote a party operative, “We must not lose the district. Lay hold of the proper agencies and secure all the Americans you can at once.”
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All seemed aware of the importance of the state’s 1858 race. “The present political canvass in Illinois is a singular one and, I think, without a parallel in the history of electioneering campaigns in the history of this country,” wrote a reporter for the
New York Evening Post
who followed it.
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Lincoln was the underdog. Douglas had enjoyed a long career in politics, was a famous U.S. senator, had nearly won the Democratic presidential nomination two years earlier and seemed the certain nominee in 1860. He had a large and formidable political organization in Illinois and a well-financed campaign to which he himself had heavily contributed. A reporter for the
New York Herald
wrote of the race, as did others, that of “the re-election of Douglas there appears to be at present very little doubt.” Besides, few in the national press, or anywhere outside of Illinois, knew much about Lincoln.
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Even in Illinois, though, where many were familiar with Lincoln and where his stature as a political strategist and public speaker was well known, the Republican candidate was seen as the underdog. Douglas had, after all, changed his mind about Lecompton, and now argued against it, as everyone in the state had hoped. Thousands of local workers owed their jobs to Douglas. His party owned or controlled several of the state’s largest newspapers. His triumphant return to Chicago to start the campaign was proof that he was a very popular man.
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Lincoln was saddled with defending a questionable conspiracy theory that he had harbored for months, in which he charged that Douglas had been part of a massive national plot to destroy the Missouri Compromise, attain slavery in Kansas, and promote the
Dred Scott
decision for, he said, “the sole purpose of nationalizing slavery.” He also had to defend his “house divided” speech, a speech that would bring him much acclaim throughout history, but one that brought him nothing but problems in his 1858 Senate race. The speech, his advisors told him, might lead voters to think that Lincoln might indeed want to eliminate slavery someday. He easily tired of the constant references by Douglas and other Democrats to his “abolitionist platform.” The constant need to defend himself curbed his chances to attack Douglas.
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He insisted too that the election was not only about slavery and spoke up frequently for the transcontinental railroad project, workers’ rights, the power of labor unions, land grants for agricultural colleges, a homestead act to permit newly arrived German immigrants to buy up farmlands cheaply, and federal money for the improvement of harbors and riverfronts. He did gain support from these arguments; many newspapers agreed with him that permitting slavery in the territories would ruin the chances of white workers gaining employment there. He also reminded voters again and again that he championed the rights of the white race as well as the black. “It is well known that I deplore the oppressed condition of the blacks; and it would, therefore, be very inconsistent for me to look with approval upon any measures that infringe upon the inalienable rights of white men,” he said.
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Lincoln ran as a pauper to Douglas’s prince. Douglas wore elegant suits; Lincoln’s were inexpensive and fit badly. Douglas dined at the best hotel restaurants; Lincoln preferred local taverns. Douglas hired his own richly appointed train car, decked with bunting and flags, for campaign travel; attached to the private car was a flatcar that carried a cannon that two men fired whenever Douglas arrived at or departed from a town. Lincoln rode in the coach cars with everyone else. Douglas traveled with his exquisitely dressed wife, whose appearance connoted her wealth; Mary Todd Lincoln stayed home until the final weeks of the campaign.

Lincoln was confident that Douglas could be beaten, even if others were not. The popular senator had stepped into a political briar patch over slavery in Kansas. In the years since Douglas’s last election, Illinois residents had increasingly rejected slavery. The growth of Chicago had made the state the key to the middle of the country’s trade with the east and west, and Lincoln wanted to do all he could to promote that advantage. Douglas, so embroiled in the intemperate debates over Kansas in Washington, had not traveled back to Illinois as often as he should have to shore up his political strength. Lincoln told friends that the Little Giant could be defeated. He wrote one man that the crowd at his speech just one day after Douglas’s talk in the same city was just as large—even though his supporters had only twelve hours to organize—and he had as many supporters as Douglas in his Democratic crowd. “Douglas took nothing by his motion there,” Lincoln wrote. “In fact, by his rampant endorsement of the
Dred Scott
decision he drove back a few Republicans who were favorably inclined towards him.”
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