The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America

The Long Pursuit

Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America

Roy Morris, Jr.

To Leslie, Lucy, and Phil—

Three facets, one diamond.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Paradise of the World

2 Whigs and Polkats

3 A Hell of a Storm

4 Defiant Recreancy

5 Thunder Tones

6 Gentlemen of the South, You Mistake Us

7 The Rush of a Great Wind

8 The Prairies Are on Fire

9 We Must Not Be Enemies

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Other Books by Roy Morris, Jr.

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

One stands today as perhaps the most revered figure in American history. The other is remembered, if at all, for a hard-fought election victory that most people believe mistakenly was a defeat. The gap between the two could scarcely be wider. Yet for much, indeed most, of their careers, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held vastly different positions in the eyes of their countrymen. For the better part of two decades, Douglas was the most famous and controversial politician in the United States, renowned for his defeats as well as his victories, a steam engine in britches who worked tirelessly and combatively for the Democratic Party and, not incidentally, for himself. Lincoln was merely Douglas’s most persistent rival within their adopted home state of Illinois. A leader in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Douglas was nearly nominated for president twice in the 1850s. Lincoln served a single undistinguished term in the House, one that he freely admitted was a flat failure. It was not until Douglas passed, almost single-handedly, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, ushering in half a decade of unprecedented civil strife in Kansas, that Lincoln reentered politics and began his inexorable and seemingly inevitable rise to the White House. Had it not been for Douglas, Lincoln would have remained merely a good trial lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, known locally for his droll sense of humor, bad jokes, and slightly nutty wife. Nationally, he was barely known at all.

If, as Lincoln said, there was a race of ambition between the two men, until 1860 Douglas not only led the race, he virtually lapped Lincoln in the backstretch. While Douglas had little need for Lincoln, Lincoln badly needed Douglas, both personally and politically, as a goad, a pace horse, and a measuring stick. When Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, remarked famously that Lincoln’s ambition was a little engine that knew no rest, he might well have added that it was the portly, combative figure of Stephen Douglas who stoked the engine. It is doubtful that Douglas, who had many rivals, ever fully realized how intensely Lincoln studied, plotted, and mulled over Douglas’s every move. He had the time. While Douglas strolled the marble halls of Congress, trailing friends and foes behind him in a cloud of smoke from his ever-present Cuban cigar, Lincoln trudged the muddy streets of Springfield alone and climbed the back stairs to his paper-strewn law office on the second floor above a haberdashery. His one link to the outside world was the stack of out-of-town newspapers that he read each morning as avidly as a marooned sailor reads strange footprints on a beach. Whenever Douglas returned to Illinois—and it was more and more infrequently—Lincoln was usually on hand to hear what he had to say and to respond, invited or not, to his remarks. In his shambling, slightly hangdog way, Lincoln functioned as a one-man truth squad for Douglas’s often flexible public pronouncements. Inherently honest himself (although not entirely immune from the professional politician’s constant temptation to stretch the truth as far as it might credibly stretch), Lincoln watched Douglas perform his regular philosophical about-faces with a certain degree of amused wonder, if not necessarily admiration. Douglas, he said, did not tell as many lies as some men I have known, but I think he cares as little for the truth…as any man I ever saw.¹

Like all ambitious politicians growing up in America in the 1830s, Lincoln and Douglas entered public life in the overbranching shadow of Andrew Jackson, and each man defined his political philosophy by how strongly he supported or opposed Jacksonian democracy. From boyhood, Douglas imbibed the heady brew of street-level, common-man politics as embodied by the far from common figure of Andy Jackson—commanding general, plantation (and slave) owner, and natural-born elitist. It was a tenet of faith with Douglas that the voice of the people spoke most loudly and clearly when it bubbled up naturally from below. The voice of the many was how he termed it. Lincoln, born somewhat lower on the social scale, had a less romantic view of stubble-bearded democrats with a small d. Along with his idol, Henry Clay, he believed that a wise and enlightened federal government was necessary to oversee the everyday workings of the American people, who were no better or worse than people anywhere, and generally could be counted upon to put their selfish interests ahead of their altruistic ones, although they could sometimes be induced to follow the better angels of [their] nature. Douglas’s view of politics was expressed most fully in his concept of popular sovereignty, or the right of the majority to decide how they would live. Lincoln took the opposite tack, defending the primacy of the individual—black and white—against the intrusions of his often-domineering neighbors. No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent, he maintained. One way or another, it is a debate that still reverberates in American society.²

Race was the crucible in which the Lincoln-Douglas rivalry was fired. Ironically, it was the frontier-born Lincoln, a son of slave-state Kentucky, who better intuited the corrosive effect that slavery had—and was having—on the nation as a whole. Douglas, born and reared in free-state Vermont, exhibited a perplexing, lifelong obtuseness on the issue. For him, slavery was essentially a political question, of interest mainly to the high-strung southerners who profited from it. Taking his cue from the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which sought to manage the conflict by separating the slave and free regions of the country much as a boxing referee separates two clinching fighters, Douglas devoted his career to seeking workable solutions to the question. To him, slaves were merely a form of property, different in kind but not in law from land or horses or cattle, and owners had a God-given right to manage their property. Beyond that, and perhaps more to the point, slaves could not vote, and Douglas was nothing if not a politician, the most gifted perhaps of his generation. Lincoln, while no wild-eyed abolitionist, had a deeper well of sympathy, forged in part by his own dirt-poor childhood, which allowed him to see black men and women as recognizable human beings engaged in the age-old struggle for food and shelter—not entirely equal to white men, perhaps, but certainly deserving the right, as he often said, to eat the bread they earned with their own hands. While no less political than Douglas (and personally more aloof and inward-looking), Lincoln could see beyond the voting booth. Men, at any rate, could not eat ballots.

For nearly three decades, well before the issue of slavery tore the nation apart, Lincoln and Douglas battled each other for political supremacy on street corners, public squares, and village greens. In so doing, they helped define and determine the course of American politics during its most convulsive era. It was an accident of timing that plunked these two larger-than-life individuals down in the same thumbprint-sized corner of backwoods Illinois, yet it now seems almost mystically predetermined that they would take their great debate, so to speak, onto the national stage. How completely Lincoln won that debate—with the eventual help of 2 million blue-clad Union soldiers—explains in part why Douglas is so comparatively forgotten today. History, as they say, is written by the winners. Despite his many electoral, legislative, and personal victories, Stephen Douglas eventually lost the political war with Abraham Lincoln the same way that he lived his life—largely, loudly, and comprehensively. But while it lasted, it was quite a fight.

1

The Paradise of the World

Some time during the winter of 1855–56, as he struggled with the galling disappointment of having lost a surefire seat in the United States Senate to his late-coming colleague Lyman Trumbull, Abraham Lincoln sat in his law office in Springfield, Illinois, and jotted down a few lines of rueful reminiscence. He was thinking not of Trumbull, as might be expected, but of an altogether longer-lived opponent, Democratic senator Stephen Douglas. Looking back on their often tumultuous rivalry, Lincoln tried his best to be objective. Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted, he recalled. "We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands."¹

About Stephen Douglas, Lincoln could speak with some authority. Indeed, few if any political opponents have ever known each other as well or as long as he and Douglas. Almost from the time they arrived, sixteen months apart, in their adopted home state of Illinois, they were fated to be rivals—first on the local, then the state, and finally the national scene. Lincoln, who was four years older, got there first, literally washing up on the shores of the tiny village of New Salem in the spring of 1831. Douglas, originally from Vermont, took a less direct route, going first to Cleveland, Ohio, then heading west to St. Louis, and finally settling down in the same west-central corner of Illinois that Lincoln had staked out a few years before him. The two men, so different from each other physically and temperamentally—Lincoln unusually tall, Douglas unusually short; Lincoln calm and rational, Douglas combative and excitable; Lincoln abstemious, Douglas a lover of whiskey, women, and fat cigars—would carry on a thirty-year struggle for political dominance. Between them they would debate and define the preeminent issues of their time. Unlike so many politicians, then and later, no one ever had to guess where they stood. They would say so, and by their actions they would give voice to millions of their fellow citizens who had not trained themselves, as Lincoln and Douglas had done, to mount the public stage and speak the truth, as they understood it, to both the powerful and the powerless.

In heading west to seek their fortunes, the two young men were following an already well-worn path. For decades, Americans by the thousands had been flocking westward, drawn by the lure of cheap land and wide-open opportunities. The chance to re-create or reinvent oneself in new surroundings—a peculiarly American concept—was particularly appealing to Lincoln and Douglas, each of whom was leaving behind a less-than-idyllic home life. Lincoln and his taciturn father, Thomas, had always had a distant relationship. The elder Lincoln could neither read nor write, and had little patience for his only son’s inherent inwardness, which served perhaps as a painful reminder of Abraham’s late mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, a tall, melancholy woman who died of milk sickness when her son was nine. Like countless other hardscrabble frontiersmen, Thomas Lincoln was a subsistence farmer and an inveterate wanderer. His own father, also named Abraham, had been shot down before his eyes by Shawnee Indians when he was eight, and that shocking death, his son later observed, placed Thomas in very narrow circumstances and set him on the path of a wandering laboring boy. In the twenty-one years that Abraham Lincoln lived at home, his father uprooted the family four times—twice the national average, even for that itinerant era—moving successively from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois in a more or less vain search for economic stability.²

Along the way, Lincoln acquired a lifelong aversion to physical labor that was ironically at odds with his later image as a hardy rail-splitter. Lincoln was lazy—a very lazy man, recalled his cousin Dennis Hanks, who lived with the family while they were growing up. He was always reading—scribbling—writing—ciphering—writing poetry. Neighbors, too, remembered the young Lincoln as being awful lazy…he was no hand to pitch in at work like killing snakes. It was not so much that Lincoln was lazy—few men ever worked harder at improving themselves—but that, gifted with a genius-level mind, he cared more about intellectual than physical pursuits. That dislike of the grindingly hard labor of the frontier did not stop Lincoln’s father from placing an ax in his son’s hands when he was seven, or from hiring him out to other farmers, for twenty-five cents a day, whenever he had a debt to pay. By the time he was seventeen, Lincoln had plowed, mowed, planted, and shucked hundreds of acres of his father’s and other people’s corn, cleared land, split fence rails, and hauled wool eighty miles back and forth to the nearest mill. That year, he began working on flatboats, an experience that opened up a wider and fairer world to the land-bound youth and eventually transported him far beyond his father’s hemmed-in world.³

Lincoln’s new life began one late-April morning in 1831, when the residents of New Salem, Illinois, awoke to a diverting spectacle. A makeshift flatboat bound for New Orleans and loaded down with wildly thrashing hogs and heavy barrels of bacon, wheat, and corn had become lodged athwart a dam on the Sangamon River. In the middle of the river, hatless and sweating, a tall, homely young man with a wild shank of black hair was striving mightily to dislodge the boat, which was taking on water at an alarming rate. It was Lincoln. With his tattered blue jeans rolled up to his knees and his blue-and-white striped shirt clinging wetly to his chest, Lincoln helped his three companions offload several barrels of cargo to shore. Then he borrowed an augur and drilled a hole in the foredeck of the boat. When enough barrels had been removed from the rear of the vessel, water drained out through the hole and the boat tipped easily over the dam and back into the river. It was a simple but ingenious solution to the problem, and the townspeople of New Salem were suitably impressed. One old settler, Caleb Carman, initially judged Lincoln to be very odd and very curious, but admitted later that after all this bad appearance I soon found [him] to be a very intelligent young man. So did the rest of the village. Two months later, on his return trip upriver, Lincoln settled in New Salem to manage a new dry goods store that his financial backer, a Micawberish businessman named Denton Offutt, planned to open. He would live there for the next six years, and when he left he would leave behind a wealth of memories, anecdotes, and tall tales that, taken together, would constitute the bedrock of the much-loved Lincoln legend.⁴

Like its newest resident, New Salem in 1831 was rough-hewn and rustic. Founded two years earlier by mill owners James Rutledge and John Camron, the village was a thrown-together conglomeration of about a dozen cabins clustered around a handful of stores and taverns on the bluff overlooking its lifeline, the Sangamon River. Lincoln, an experienced river hand, fit right in. He took over the management of Offutt’s store, whose owner, a gassy, windy, brain-rattling man, spent most of his time talking and drinking. Lincoln, too, did his share of talking, if not drinking—he was a confirmed teetotaler. The one useful trait he had inherited from his father was a gift for storytelling, and he entertained his new friends with shaggy-dog stories and rambling jokes, including one slightly off-color jab at the English. In Lincoln’s telling, Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen makes a postwar visit to England, where he is annoyed by his hosts’ derisive habit of placing a portrait of George Washington in their privies. This is entirely appropriate, retorts Allen, since there is nothing that will make an Englishman shit so quick as the sight of General Washington. Another Lincoln story involved a Baptist preacher who confidently announces to his congregation that he is the physical representation of Jesus Christ. When a blue lizard runs up his pant leg, the startled preacher throws off his pants and shirt and cavorts across the stage in his underwear, at which point an old lady stands up and announces: If you represent Christ then I’m done with the Bible.⁵

Along with his storytelling talents, Lincoln won over the locals with his strength and grit. In a frontier society that valued courage above all other qualities, Lincoln was inevitably challenged to show his moxie. The challenger, a burly tough named Jack Armstrong, was the leader of a gang of homespun layabouts known locally as the Clary’s Grove Boys. Denton Offutt, as was his wont, had been bragging loudly that his new employee was the strongest man and the best rough-and-tumble wrestler in the area. Armstrong took exception. Despite his stated aversion to the wooling and pulling of a wrestling match, Lincoln had no choice but to accept the challenge—to have walked away would have branded him ineffaceably as a coward. He met Armstrong in the village square at the appointed time. Memories differed on the winner of the match, but everyone agreed that the funny-looking new shop clerk had shown the right stuff, and Armstrong and his gang eventually would become a combination private bodyguard and personal cheering section for Lincoln when he entered the hurly-burly of public life.⁶

More refined friends included millwright James Rutledge, New Salem’s de facto mayor; transplanted Vermont physician John Allen; village schoolteacher Mentor Graham; and 300-pound justice of the peace Bowling Green, nicknamed Pot for his enormous overhanging stomach. Besides welcoming Lincoln into the local debating club, the quartet made a suggestion in the spring of 1832 that surprised and flattered their callow young friend—in fact, it changed his life. Harking back to his experience on the river, they encouraged him to enter politics by running for the Illinois legislature from Sangamon County. It was not as much of a stretch as it seemed. Most of the legislators who met once a year at the hardscrabble state capital in Vandalia were as unpolished as Lincoln—farmers, millers, and humble tradesmen who typically voted on nothing more elevated than whether or not to fence in their neighbors’ cattle. Lincoln, if elected, would be expected to focus primarily on a subject of vital importance to all New Salem residents—improving the Sangamon River. Rumors of a new railroad linking Springfield and Jacksonville to the Illinois River and bypassing New Salem altogether had everyone in the village worried. Without navigational improvements to their sluggish, driftwood-choked lifeline, there would be no way for them to effectively transport goods to and from St. Louis. New Salem would die.⁷

With the help of Graham and fellow storekeeper John McNeil, Lincoln crafted an announcement notice for the Sangamo Journal. Acknowledging that he was young and unknown to many of you, Lincoln conceded that he had been born and remained in the most humble walks of life, with no wealthy or popular relations to recommend me. Besides being true, the admission was also good politics. Most of the independent voters of this county upon whose judgment and mercy he was throwing himself were also poor and undistinguished, and Lincoln, at the very beginning of his career, was shrewd enough to make a virtue of his—and their—unfavored upbringing. An enterprising scholar later counted no fewer than thirty-five references by Lincoln to his humble background before he ran for president in 1860. The heart of his announcement stressed his experience on the river. From my peculiar circumstances, Lincoln wrote, it is probable that for the last twelve months I have given as particular attention to the stage of the water in this river, as any other person in the country. He underscored his experience a few days later by helping to guide the riverboat Talisman upriver from Beardstown to Springfield and down the Sangamon to New Salem, where Rutledge’s dam had to be partially destroyed to allow the vessel to pass through it—further highlighting the need for improvements to the river.⁸

Lincoln’s entry into politics was interrupted as soon as it began by worrisome news from the western frontier. Chief Black Hawk, the aging leader of the Sauk and Fox Indians, had crossed back into Illinois from Iowa, where he had grudgingly removed himself and his people after signing away 50 million acres of tribal land to Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison in 1804. Citing boilerplate language in the treaty that gave the Sauks continued use of the land until it was sold by the government, Black Hawk wanted to return and plant corn again on his ancestral stamping ground. White settlers now squatting on that ground naturally disagreed, and the call went out for 1,700 Illinois miltiamen to join 340 regular army troops in putting down the uprising. Among those answering the call was Lincoln, who was motivated less by military than financial reasons. By that time, Denton Offutt had run off, literally, to join the circus, taking a position as a horse trainer for a traveling show in Georgia, but not before getting his reluctant clerk to split enough rails to pen up 1,000 hogs behind the store. With his newfound livelihood threatened, Lincoln had pressing need of the $125 salary being offered by the state of Illinois for warm-blooded volunteers.⁹

To his immense surprise and gratification, Lincoln was elected captain of the New Salem militia company (Jack Armstrong was his sergeant). For the next two and a half months—he reenlisted twice—Lincoln and his charges trooped through an invariable sameness of swamps, gullies, and underbrush in pursuit of Indians they never found. The closest they came was discovering the remains of five settlers who, unfortunately for them, had been more successful in finding Indians and had their scalps lifted for their troubles. The sight made an understandable impression on Lincoln, who recalled many years later: The red light of the morning sun came streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground, and every man had a round, red spot on top of his head, and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over. Lincoln’s company was far away when the main force of white soldiers caught up with Black Hawk’s band on the banks of the Mississippi in southwestern Wisconsin on August 2, 1832, and killed 300 of them at the Battle of Bad Axe. The small and foolish war, as historian Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., termed it, ended soon afterward, with Black Hawk being escorted in leg irons to Jefferson Barracks at St. Louis by a young army lieutenant named Jefferson Davis.¹⁰

Returning to New Salem on foot after his horse was stolen, Lincoln got back too late to do much campaigning before the August 6 election. Deeply suntanned from his weeks in the field, the neophyte candidate told potential voters—no doubt needlessly—that he was almost as red as those men I have been chasing through the prairies and forests on the rivers of Illinois. A local observer captured Lincoln during his first campaign: He wore a mixed jeans coat, clawhammer style, short in the sleeves and bobtail—in fact it was so short in the tail he could not sit on it; flax and tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat. Despite his undeniably eye-catching appearance, Lincoln failed to capture many votes, finishing eighth out of thirteen candidates, although he did receive 277 of the 300 votes cast in his hometown precinct. It would prove to be, as he never failed to remind listeners afterward, the only time he was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people.¹¹

With the desertion of Offutt, Lincoln went back to looking for full-time work. Attempting to capitalize on his recent experience, he threw in with a former member of his militia company, William Berry, and opened a new grocery store. It proved to be no more successful than Offutt’s had been, even after the partners acquired a license to sell liquor on the premises. Not even the addition of wine, rum, peach brandy, and whiskey served by the dipper enabled the store to turn a profit, and it gradually winked out, in Lincoln’s gentle phrase. Still, his popularity in the community was such that Lincoln’s friends managed to convince government officials in Washington to appoint him village postmaster after the current officeholder, Samuel Hill, unexpectedly resigned. Lincoln made no secret of his Whig political leanings—he had voted for Henry Clay for president against Andrew Jackson in the last election—but the post was too insignificant in the larger scheme of things, he noted, for his own party affiliation to matter much to higher-ups. In May 1833, he began selling stamps and delivering letters, undemanding occupations that permitted him to stay in the public eye while performing useful little services for his would-be constituents. It also gave him access to all the newspapers passing through the post office, a particularly pleasant perk for a constant reader such as Lincoln. Less than a year after arriving in New Salem unceremoniously on the deck of a flatboat, the twenty-four-year-old stranger was now a valued member of the community.¹²

Stephen Douglas’s entry into Illinois was considerably less dramatic than Lincoln’s. He rolled into Jacksonville, the seat of Morgan County, in the middle of the night, climbing down from his stagecoach near dawn on November 2, 1833. He had less than $5 in his pocket. Not yet twenty-one, Douglas had followed Lincoln’s similarly wandering path to Illinois, but with a few important differences that reflected the not-insignificant gap in their social status. While Lincoln was the son of an illiterate backwoodsman, Douglas had been born into upper-middle-class privilege, the son of a Vermont physician with sturdy New England connections going back 200 years. His people had fought in King Philip’s War and the Revolution, acquired large landholdings in Connecticut, New York, and Vermont, and showed a natural bent for politics and public service. Douglas’s paternal grandfather, Benajah Douglass (Stephen dropped the second s some years later), served five terms in the Vermont General Assembly, and also held office as a selectman and justice of the peace in Brandon, Vermont, where Stephen was born on April 23, 1813. Besides the modest financial bequest that Douglas inherited from his grandfather when he died in 1829, he also inherited his stumpy legs, large head, stentorian speaking voice, and boundless self-confidence. He would, in time, put all these traits to good use.¹³

It was lucky for Douglas that his grandfather was so generous, genetically and financially, since his own father—through no fault of his own—was a complete void in his son’s life. He died, in fact, when Douglas was two months old, dropping dead from an apparent heart attack at the age of thirty-two while dandling his infant son on his knee near an open fire. According to family legend, an alert neighbor named John Conant scooped the baby from the flames in the nick of time. Douglas’s narrow escape coincided with an immediate drop in the family’s fortunes. His still-young mother, Sarah Fisk Douglass, with a newborn son and a one-year-old daughter to provide for, moved in with her brother, Edward Fisk, who owned the farm adjoining the widow’s land. Fisk was a bachelor—an industrious, economical, clever old bachelor, his nephew later wrote, with a subtle undertone of distaste—and he quickly combined the two properties into a single holding, his own. Besides acquiring his sister’s land, he also acquired the services of her son as a common laborer, not unlike Abraham Lincoln’s filial indenture to his father. Like Lincoln, Douglas came to resent both the work and the master. I thought it a hardship that my uncle would have the use of my mother’s farm and also the benefit of my labor without any other equivalent than my boarding and clothes, he recalled in an autobiographical sketch in 1838.¹⁴

Determined to get out from under his uncle’s control, Douglas convinced his mother to permit him to see what I could do for myself in the wide world among strangers. The wide world was fourteen miles away—one mile for each year of his life—and located at Middlebury, Vermont, where Douglas apprenticed himself to a local cabinetmaker with the sturdy New England name of Nahum Parker. Douglas already had learned the rudiments of woodworking from another maternal uncle, Jonathan Fisk, and he commenced helping Parker make tables, washstands, and beds. Eight months later he was back home in Brandon, having fallen out with his master over the nature of his duties (apparently, Parker wanted him to be a house servant as well as an apprentice) and his burgeoning interest in politics. The fall of 1828 was a polarizing time in American political life. Incumbent president John Quincy Adams was facing a monumental challenge from Tennessean Andrew Jackson, the same man he had narrowly defeated in 1824, when the undecided presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Charges of a corrupt bargain between Adams and Kentucky congressman Henry Clay, who became Adams’s secretary of state, had arisen immediately after