Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [137]
Although there was little new in the Alton debate, Koerner believed that Lincoln’s speech included “some of the finest passages of all the speeches he ever made.” The “real issue,” Lincoln argued, the issue that would continue long after the “tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” was “the eternal struggle between…right and wrong”; the “common right of humanity” set against “the divine right of kings….
“It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” With this, Lincoln took his seat, Douglas made his concluding remarks, and the great debates came to an end.
In this race, as in all others, Lincoln was his own political manager. He drew up for his supporters a detailed battle plan, examining every district in the state and listing those he regarded as lost, those “we take to ourselves,” and those “to be struggled for.” Between his speeches, he drafted letters of instruction to key supporters, telling Koerner, for example, “We are in great danger in Madison. It is said half the Americans are going for Douglas…. Nothing must be left undone. Elsewhere things look reasonably well. Please write me.”
Though Eastern Republicans stayed out of the race, Chase came to Illinois to stump for the Republican ticket. He believed that Lincoln was a man who could be trusted on the antislavery issue, while at the same time he recognized that the prairie lawyer could be helpful to him in the upcoming presidential convention. More clearly than Seward or Greeley, Chase saw from the start that Douglas would never truly stand with the antislavery forces. For eight days, traveling to Chicago, Galena, Warren, Rockford, and Mendota, Chase spoke to thousands on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican ticket in Illinois—a gesture Lincoln would not forget.
It was a dreary day, November 2, 1858, when the voters of Illinois went to the polls. The names of Lincoln and Douglas did not appear on the ballots, since the state legislature would choose the next senator. That evening, Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns with his friends in the telegraph office. Once again, he would be sorely disappointed. Though the Republicans had won the popular vote, the Democrats had retained control of the state legislature, thereby ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Lincoln’s supporters were disconsolate and angry, blaming an unfair apportionment scheme. Koerner charged that “by the gerrymandering the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one thousand Republican votes.” Republicans in Illinois bewailed the lack of support from Eastern Republicans and bitterly resented a last-minute intervention by the respected Whig leader and Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who had penned a series of highly publicized letters to Illinois, urging old Whigs and American supporters to vote for Douglas to repay his Lecompton stance. “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the election, through the influence of Crittenden,” Herndon complained.
Two days later, still feeling the sting of his defeat, Lincoln wrote Crittenden. He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the world of politics. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use of your name