The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [69]
Lincoln surely anticipated Douglas’s response since, as his rival remarked, he had already given his answer “a hundred times from every stump in Illinois.” The people of a territory, Douglas declared, could lawfully prohibit slavery by refusing to enact the “local police regulations” without which owners would not risk bringing slaves into an area, or by enacting “unfriendly legislation.” A few weeks earlier, Jefferson Davis had said much the same thing in a speech in Maine. Douglas was so pleased with his formula, which enabled him to claim fealty to both Dred Scott and popular sovereignty, that he repeated it in subsequent debates. On one occasion he directly quoted Davis’s Maine speech to demonstrate the national appeal of his “Freeport doctrine.”25
In a letter on the eve of the Freeport debate conveying the recommendations of Republican strategists, the Chicago editor Joseph Medill urged Lincoln to “make short work of…nigger equality charges by telling him…that it is humbug, slang and trash.” But Lincoln was already receiving letters from supporters in central and southern Illinois about the political impact of these charges, and urging him to make clear in no uncertain terms that “the Republicans are not in favor of making the blacks socially and politically equal with the whites.” As the debates proceeded, Douglas relied more and more on race baiting. He claimed, for example, that Frederick Douglass had been seen in Illinois campaigning for Lincoln, “reclin[ing]” in a carriage next to the white driver’s wife.26
At the fourth debate in Charleston, a town of 14,000 in the heart of Old Whig territory in central Illinois, Lincoln tried to neutralize Douglas’s assaults with an explicit statement on the question of racial equality:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
Later in the debate, Lincoln stated that while he believed states had the constitutional right to make blacks citizens, he was “opposed to [its] exercise” in Illinois.27
Several times during the debates, Douglas accused Lincoln of altering his positions according to the political geography of Illinois. Certainly, a marked difference existed between the principled affirmation of equality in his Chicago speech early in the campaign and Lincoln’s remarks at Charleston, where he even omitted his usual statement that blacks were entitled to the kind of equality outlined in the Declaration. At the next debate, at Galesburg in north-central Illinois, Lincoln did return to this theme, insisting that no one until the past few years had denied that the language of the Declaration about natural rights was meant to apply to blacks. But for the rest of the campaign he continued to deny that he favored black citizenship. Abolitionists found Lincoln’s comments