Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [131]
The image of America as an unfinished house in danger of collapse worked brilliantly because it provided a ringing challenge to the Republican audience, a call for action to throw out the conspiring carpenters, unseat the Democratic Party, and recapture control of the nation’s building blocks—the laws that had wisely prevented the spread of slavery. Only then, Lincoln claimed, with the public mind secure in the belief that slavery was once more on a course to eventual extinction, would the people in all sections of the country live together peaceably in the great house their forefathers had built.
In the campaign that followed, Douglas would strenuously deny that he had ever conspired with Taney and Buchanan before the Dred Scott decision. “What if Judge Douglas never did talk with Chief Justice Taney and the President,” replied Lincoln. “It can only show that he was used by conspirators, and was not a leader of them.” This charge reflected his agreement with Seward and Chase that—whether there was an explicit conspiracy—there was a mutual intent by the slave power to extend slavery. Edward Bates also feared that Southern radicals “planned to seize control of the federal government and nationalize slavery.”
SO THE STAGE WAS SET for a titanic battle, arguably the most famous Senate fight in American history, a clash that would make Lincoln a national figure and propel him to the presidency while it would, at the same time, undermine Douglas’s support in the South and further fracture the Democratic Party.
In keeping with political strategy followed to this day, Lincoln, the challenger, asked Douglas to campaign with him so they could debate the issues. The incumbent, Douglas, who boasted a national reputation and deep pockets, had little to gain from debating Lincoln and initially refused the challenge, but eventually felt compelled to participate in the seven face-to-face debates known to history as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
In the course of the campaign, both men covered over 4,000 miles within Illinois, delivering hundreds of speeches. The northern part of the state was Republican territory. In the southern counties, populated largely by migrants from the South, the proslavery sentiment dominated. The election would be decided in the central section of Illinois, where the debates became the centerpiece of the struggle. With marching bands, parades, fireworks, banners, flags, and picnics, the debates brought tens of thousands of people together with “all the devoted attention,” one historian has noted, “that many later Americans would reserve for athletic contests.”
Attending the debate in Quincy, the young Republican leader Carl Schurz recounted how “the country people began to stream into town for the great meeting, some singly, on foot or on horseback, or small parties of men and women, and even children, in buggies or farm wagons; while others were marshaled in solemn procession from outlying towns or districts…. It was indeed the whole American people that listened to those debates,” continued Schurz, later remarking that “the spectacle reminded one of those lays of ancient times telling us of two armies in battle array, standing still to see their two principal champions fight out the contested cause between the lines in single combat.” The debates, said Lincoln in Quincy, “were the successive acts of a drama…to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like this, but in the face of the nation.”
“On the whole,” Schurz observed, “the Democratic displays were much more elaborate and gorgeous than those of the Republicans, and it was said that Douglas had plenty of money to spend