Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [132]
Each debate followed the same rules. The first contestant spoke for an hour, followed by a one-and-a-half-hour response, after which the man who had gone first would deliver a half-hour rebuttal. The huge crowds were riveted for the full three hours, often interjecting comments, cheering for their champion, bemoaning the jabs of his opponent. Newspaper stenographers worked diligently to take down every word, and their transcripts were swiftly dispatched throughout the country.
“No more striking contrast could have been imagined than that between those two men as they appeared upon the platform,” one observer wrote. “By the side of Lincoln’s tall, lank, and ungainly form, Douglas stood almost like a dwarf, very short of stature, but square-shouldered and broad-chested, a massive head upon a strong neck, the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying power.”
The highly partisan papers concocted contradictory pictures of crowd response and outcome. At the end of the first debate, the Republican Chicago Press and Tribune reported that “when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front.” Observing the same occasion, the Democratic Chicago Times claimed that when it was over, Douglas’s “excoriation of Lincoln” had been so successful and “so severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame.”
The people of Illinois had followed the careers of Douglas and, to a lesser extent, Lincoln for nearly a quarter of a century as they represented opposing parties in the State House, in Congress, and on the campaign trail. Indeed, in the opening debate at Ottawa, Douglas spoke of his first acquaintance with Lincoln when they were “both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land,” when Lincoln was “just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody,” as well as the lifelong epithet “Honest Abe.”
The amiable tone was laced with innuendo as Douglas described Lincoln’s climb from “flourishing grocery-keeper” (meaning that Lincoln sold liquor, a curious charge from the notoriously hard-drinking Douglas) to the state legislature, where they had served together in 1836, till Lincoln was “submerged…for some years,” turning up again in Congress, where he “in the Senate…was glad to welcome my old friend,” for he had neither friends nor companions. “He distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends. He came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or Black Republican platform, in company with Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase, and Fred Douglass for the Republican party to stand upon.” With this, the crowd broke into laughter, shouting: “Hit him again.”
Lincoln readily conceded that Douglas was far better known than he. As he outlined the advantages of Douglas’s stature, however, his audience laughed with glee. “All the anxious politicians of his party,” Lincoln told a crowd at Springfield, “have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, postoffices,