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What I’m Reading Now 9

Posted March 11, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.

What I’m Reading Now: The Renaissance at War (Smithsonian History of Warfare) by Thomas F. Arnold (2006)
What I Just Finished Reading: Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America by Allen Guelzo published by Simon & Schuster (2009)

One hundred and fifty years ago the Democratic Party was the school where Americans learned the pernicious doctrine of White Supremacy. Immigrants arriving at the docks without any understanding of the racial caste system in America could count on being met by a Democratic ward heeler who would assure them that however miserable the greenhorn’s lot, he was still better off than the blacks.

Few Northern Democrats were better instructors in the superiority of the white race than the tiny alcoholic Senator from Illinois Stephen A. Douglas. He made a career out of convincing white voters that they were the natural masters of blacks. In his position as the head of the Senate’s committee in charge of the territories, Douglas tried to spread white supremacy throughout the new states being incorporated into the Union.

The Founders had established a new Republic in 1776 that permitted slavery. But through the Northwest Ordinance, which barred slavery in the territories acquired through the Revolution, they put a choker around slavery’s expansion that could foreseeably kill it one day. Douglas, working with the worst representatives of the Southern “Slave Power”, took the choker off when he succeeded in passing legislation allowing each territory to decide for itself whether it would be free or slave. His effort was advanced even further when the Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott decision that a slave brought onto free territory was still a slave.

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln sought to break this paladin of the slaveocrats.

Illinois was a Northern state, but it was not anti-slavery Massachusetts. The southern part of the state, call “Egypt” because its heart was the city of Cairo, looked more to the South than to New England. An abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy, who had moved to Illinois to escape pro-slavery violence in Missouri, had been murdered by a mob almost two decades before Lincoln challenged Douglas. Anti-black sentiment ran so hot that in 1853 the state passed a law making it illegal for free blacks to settle in Illinois.

Douglas defended the racist laws passed by the states and lauded the use of elections to decide if states should have slavery. He called his doctrine “popular sovereignty”, in which white men could determine the destiny of non-whites through the democratic process. Lincoln berated “popular sovereignty”, saying that it was a “total violation of the true doctrine of democracy that no man is good enough to govern another man without that man’s consent.”

When Lincoln was nominated to run against Douglas, he shocked Republican leaders with his acceptance speech. The bosses wanted to make their new party acceptable to moderates. Lincoln warned that America was a “house divided”. He said that “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Lincoln’s seeming premonition of Civil War horrified the pols backing the two year old Republican Party. But, they energized hundreds of thousands of Americans who viewed the spread of slavery into the territories, and pro-slavery terrorism in Kansas, with disgust and fear.

In one of Lincoln’s first addresses of the campaign, from a hotel balcony with just a day’s notice, 9,000 people turned up to hear the Springfield lawyer speak. Lincoln used the occassion to berate Douglas who had described slavery as an “exceedingly little thing”. Lincoln responded that slavery kept one-sixth of the population “in a state of oppression and tyranny unequaled in the world”, and said the institution Douglas defended was a “vast moral evil.” He warned his audience that Americans must stop “quibbling about…this race and that race being inferior” and instead “unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

This was a bold step. Lincoln insisted that when the Founders, some of whom were slave holders, said that all men were created equal, they meant non-white as well as white. He understood that there were elements of hypocrisy in the Declaration, but he also demanded that the Founders be taken at their word. He insisted that the plain meaning of the Declaration govern and that its spirit be read into a Constitution that, admittedly, protected slavery.

When the Debates began between the career politician and the free-soil activist, they attracted national attention. There were seven debates in different parts of the state over a two month period. Douglas hit the same basic points in each speech, but Lincoln understood the evolving communications technology of his day. Rail travel meant that transcripts of the debates would be printed in the Chicago papers a day after they were given. They could be in the Boston and New York papers a few days later. So, while Douglas clearly saw himself as primarily addressing the five to ten thousand voters standing in the crowd in front of him, Lincoln understood that he was really making his case to the nation. So, he used each speech to develop different points in his argument for restricting slavery and for putting it on the road towards ultimate extinction.

The debates themselves were brutal. An abolitionist threw a piece of mellon at Douglas during one debate, and crowds tried to drown the Senator out when he spoke. Lincoln was described in the press as getting so angry at a lie Douglas put forward that he had to be physically restrained by his handlers.

And there was not just a race card being played, in some debates race seemed like Douglas’s whole deck.

In one debate the Senator told his listeners that the last time he had been in the town the abolitionist ex-slave Frederick Douglas had been there to give a speech. The black man was in a carriage with a white woman, while the woman’s husband was on top driving the carriage, a job properly reserved for a slave. Douglas asked the crowd if they “really wanted the nigger on a social equality with your wives and daughter.”

This theme of the sexual threat of black men to white women, which Douglas implied might be attractive to the weaker sex, was a constant throughout the debates. Freedom, he opined, would lead to racial amalgamation.

Lincoln responded that there were already nearly half-a-million Americans of mixed race, mostly in the slave states, and he said that if race mixing was to be feared, slavery, in which a white man could always take his pleasure with a black woman, did not seem good insurance against it.

As we all know, Lincoln lost the election. His law partner blamed the loss on “thousands of wild, roving, robbing, bloated, pock-marked Irish”, and analysis Lincoln did not share. But Lincoln won the national debate. He went from being a man virtually unknown outside of the central part of Illinois to his party’s standard bearer two years later. Allen Guelzo’s book on the debates is a valuable examination of a very ugly campaign in which the moral vacuity of the Democrats is laid bare, and Lincoln the activist is transformed into Lincoln the politician capable of winning the presidency.

Tags : books, lincoln, what i'm reading now

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