The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [70]
Seeking to fight on the most favorable political terrain, Douglas persistently maintained that the question of “what shall be done with the free negro” far exceeded the slavery controversy in importance. For his part, having answered to his own satisfaction the charge of “Negro equality,” Lincoln in the last three debates pushed to the forefront the subject he felt most fully exemplified his differences with Douglas—the morality of slavery. At Galesburg he declared that the “real difference” between himself and Douglas was that “every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is anything wrong in slavery.” He said much the same thing six days later at the Quincy debate.29 The seventh and final encounter took place at Alton, where Elijah P. Lovejoy had met his death two decades earlier. Neither man mentioned the martyred editor, although Douglas referred in passing to his brother Owen Lovejoy. Lincoln tried to appeal to the broadest spectrum of the antislavery electorate. To adopt Douglas’s policies, he said, would make it impossible for “free white people,” including immigrants—“Hans and Baptiste and Patrick”—to find new homes and “better their conditions in life” by moving to the West. Here was a racialized antislavery that seemed to view the peculiar institution primarily as a threat to the future prospects of white Americans. But at the same time, Lincoln repeated that the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence applied to blacks. He accused Democrats of attempting to “dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man…to make property, and nothing but property of the Negro in all the states of this Union.” In the rhetorical high point of the seven debates, he identified the long crusade against slavery with the global progress of democratic egalitarianism:
That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world…. The one is the common right of humanity and the other 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.30
While their debates attracted the most attention, Lincoln and Douglas campaigned incessantly throughout the state. Both traveled thousands of miles by rail, but both concentrated their efforts in central Illinois. The northern counties, Lincoln wrote, “we take to ourselves, without question.” As for parts of southern Illinois, “no use trying.” To woo the pivotal Old Line Whigs of central Illinois, Lincoln read “extract after extract” from Henry Clay’s speeches and letters, insisting that he “stood on the very ground occupied by that statesman” while Douglas “was as opposite to it as Beelzebub to an Angel of Light.” For their part, Democrats harped increasingly on the House Divided and Chicago speeches to portray Lincoln as a dangerous radical. Douglas asserted that Republicans planned to repeal Illinois’s Negro exclusion law, opening the door “for all the negro population to flow in and cover our prairies; in mid-day they will look dark and black as night.” “No man of his time,” Frederick Douglass would remark when Douglas died in 1861, “has done more than he to intensify hatred of the negro.”31
Lincoln’s supporters feared Democratic racism was having a political impact. All Republican speakers, David Davis insisted, must “distinctly and emphatically disavow negro suffrage, negro holding