“Let the voice of the people rule.” With this grandiose declaration at the dawn of 1859, Stephen Arnold Douglas welcomed the news that the Illinois legislature had re-elected him to the United States Senate. His victory over Abraham Lincoln followed a statewide campaign whose outcome, two months earlier, he had already deemed a “glorious triumph for the principle of self-government.” The Democratic senator’s euphoria was understandable. He had survived an unexpectedly strong challenge from the newly organized Republican party, and also seen off the “Danites,” the local supporters of President James Buchanan, keen to punish him for his spectacular breach with the national administration. Pushing his voice and body to their limits during the four-month campaign, when he traveled some five thousand miles to deliver nearly sixty speeches, Douglas had drawn on the debating qualities that had won him the title of the “Little Giant” and made him the most formidable congressional presence of his time.
Throughout that summer and fall Douglas had repeatedly castigated Lincoln for his leadership of a party tainted with abolitionist poison, insisting a Republican victory would open the door to a racial revolution that would not only raise African Americans to civic and political equality with whites but also promote the races’ sexual intermixing. Acutely attuned to Illinois voters’ deep race consciousness and to the strength of conservative sentiment in the state’s swing counties, Douglas hammered home his twin themes: Lincoln’s ill-concealed radicalism and, by contrast, the stabilizing, consensual benefits of his own doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” which honored within each state and territorial community the wishes of the democratic majority of white men.
Was the Little Giant the real victor, however? It was, after all, chiefly thanks to Lincoln and not Douglas that the joint debates of 1858—prologue to a reversal of their respective fortunes in the presidential race of 1860—would become the stuff of legend. And there are more prosaic reasons for crowning Lincoln with the moral victor’s laurels. As his lamenting supporters maintained, and as Allen Guelzo confirms in his splendid new study of the campaign, Lincoln would surely have won a direct popular election. Opposition Republican candidates for the legislature that sent Douglas to Washington actually secured more votes than those cast for the incumbent’s own Democratic party. It was Democratic holdovers and an outdated apportionment which gave Douglas a narrow majority in the two houses of the legislature: thanks to the rapidly changing demography of Illinois during the 1850s it took more votes to elect a Republican than a Democrat.
Douglas won, but at a cost. Lincoln’s question to Douglas at Freeport, designed to expose the incompatibility of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling (upholding slaveholders’ rights in the federal territories) and Douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine (reverencing local opinion) elicited an answer that did Douglas real damage among the southern Democrats who dominated the party in Washington. Douglas’ position was not new, but in its more high-profile and widely discussed form as the “Freeport Doctrine”—that a territorial legislature could effectively prohibit slavery simply by failing to pass protective local laws—it came to be the handiest of all weapons for those out to deny him the presidential nomination in 1860.
At the same time, Lincoln could take credit for having used the Freeport exchanges, and the joint debates collectively, to highlight the deep differences between him and his better-known, more successful rival. Eastern Republicans, dazzled by Douglas in the early months of 1858 when he confronted the Buchanan administration over its supine support for the proslavery Lecompton constitution in Kansas, looked to embrace a stunning convert and urged he be allowed a clear run for re-election. It was philosophical concern and not mere self-interest that prompted alarm in Lincoln and his western allies: the ensuing canvass exposed the chasm between the clarity of the Republicans’ policy of slavery restriction and the moral slipperiness of Douglas’ version of popular sovereignty. Lincoln’s earnest stand against the lower ground of popular sovereignty, at a defining moment in his party’s evolution, stiffened Republicans’ ideological backbone. It would also give credibility to his bid for the presidential nomination in 1860.
Stamped with the author’s hallmarks of assured scholarship, acute analysis, and vivid writing, Lincoln and Douglas makes its major contribution to historical understanding by placing the familiar seven joint debates within the commonly neglected and much broader election campaign. Guelzo graphically describes the atmosphere of the contest, its blood and muscle, its function as popular entertainment, and its effect on the protagonists. As Lincoln grew in self-confidence, confounding expectations that he would be embarrassingly out-gunned, so Douglas became increasingly ill-tempered, and his recourse to alcoholic relief only helped slur his swollen-tongued responses to “Misha Linka.” Lincoln, alert to the combined power of the stenographers, the telegraph, and the newspaper press, saw the advantage in developing his arguments and altering his focus as the campaign advanced; Douglas did not.
More profoundly, Guelzo shows how over the course of the protracted campaign both speakers pursued a strategy in conjunction with their state committees. Neither protagonist was keen on the idea of joint debates (which were barely debates at all but, rather, sequential speeches). Douglas felt he had more to lose in head-to-head encounters, and Lincoln only reluctantly agreed to them, fearing that his opponent would use his “imperious and emphatic style of oratory” to rouse crowds packed with idolizing supporters. But the candidates and their managers were of one mind that success would lie, above all, in personally addressing as many voters as possible in the swing counties of central Illinois. Breaking the campaign down into five distinct phases, Guelzo shows how, even when the joint debates were held at one or other extremity of the state (Ottawa and Freeport in the pro-Republican north; Jonesboro in the Democrat-strong south), the candidates spent most of their time crisscrossing the central heartlands to attract the conservative Whig and American party voters on whom the outcome would depend.
Guelzo’s approach yields rich rewards, not least in showing how Lincoln’s commonly cited remarks at Charleston, brutally explicit in their readiness to keep blacks in their inferior social and political position, were a response not only to Douglas’ increasingly effective recourse to racial demagoguery but also to the urgent pleas of Lincoln’s local Republican advisors desperate to stop old Whigs shifting to Douglas because he was “sound on niggers.” Lincoln’s words at Charleston were indeed, in Guelzo’s judicious characterization, an ugly pandering to racial animosities, but it was manifestly an uncomfortable statement, and thoughtfully calculated in what it did not say. It denied blacks their claim to civil rights but did nothing to assert a natural inferiority or to question the natural rights which he unyieldingly believed were due to blacks as part of their common humanity with whites—and which, as encoded in the Declaration of Independence, were God-given and inalienable.
The book’s subtitle is the cue for its most significant argument. Some have denied that there were serious differences between the two debaters: at bottom, both wanted the western territories kept for free labor; neither championed the civil rights of free blacks. Sharing Harry Jaffa’s Straussian reading of the debates, Guelzo argues that they “defined” America, because Lincoln understood democracy to involve more than a political-institutional process: the “universal” white male franchise, and the government by popular majority that it produced, were only as moral as the ends at which those arrangements were directed. There had to be an ethical core to democratic politics. Guelzo deems Douglas, by contrast, a moral neuter, determined not to give a lead on the rights of blacks, slave or free, but instead to leave this to the democratic processes of individual states and territories. Believing, in Guelzo’s words, that “liberal democracy existed only to provide a procedural framework for exercising rights,” Douglas understood politics not as the pursuit of “what is good and true” but rather as the means of ensuring “fair play, toleration, and personal autonomy.” Guelzo’s underlying theme is that this contest between rival understandings of democracy—process, ambiguity and self-seeking on one side; principle and righteousness on the other—was more than a historical episode, but remains an unresolved struggle in American political life. He leaves his readers in no doubt as to which model he esteems.
Guelzo is certainly right about Lincoln. Many Illinois voters, after all, understood Lincoln in these terms, as an agent of righteousness. He was, in the words of a Vermilion County Quaker, “fairly mounted on the eternal invulnerable bulwark of truth,” wrestling an opponent who had “the devil on his side.” But it is less certain that Douglas’ privileging of process, through popular sovereignty, was driven by a conviction of its being the only proper end of politics. Rather “pop sov” was a necessary political device, one which he judged had a better chance than any other of preventing the question of slavery’s future—its spread or restriction—from blowing the nation asunder. It worked successfully for him once, as the manager of the congressional advocates of compromise in 1850, but when embraced in the Nebraska Bill of 1854 the doctrine prompted the very explosion he had sought to avoid. Repackaged in his party’s platform of 1856, in the new formula of “congressional non-interference” with slavery, such fudging could not survive the sectional fal-out over Dred Scott and Lecompton. Douglas presented process as principle all the more insistently in 1858 because he had been boxed into a position within his party where local democracy was his only route of escape; he made a virtue of political compulsion. But this should not disguise the fact that Douglas, too, had a broad political vision that went beyond mere pragmatic process. It encompassed the liberation of the wisdom of the common man, the economic development of the West, the permanence of a confederated Union, and the “onward march” of American civilization to fill the continent and dominate the hemisphere. That it was deaf to the cries of the slave, blind to the ethical legitimacy of abolitionism, and stern in its defense of the existing racial hierarchy makes it deeply offensive to modern sensibilities, but it was the moral order in which Douglas, his party, and many of his fellow citizens profoundly believed—and one which, he insisted, “popular sovereignty” was best designed to serve.
Richard Carwardine is Rhodes professor of American History at Oxford University. He is the author most recently of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (Knopf).
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