Chapter XII

THE GRAPPLE OF GIANTS

INCOLN'S bold stand taken at Springfield not only

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made him the logical candidate for the seat in the

Senate occupied by Douglas, but it made him the people's choice to lead them out of the wilderness of conflicting opinions and passions to stability of government. At the same time it lifted Douglas to the most extreme point of opposition to those ideals. Like the sun breaking through dark clouds, Lincoln's logic shone into the darkest corners and revealed the miasma of the swamps as well as the splendor of the upper landscape.

Douglas and Lincoln at last stood face to face before the people. The Little Giant could no longer pass his antagonist by with petty compliments of his "amiable" qualities or his "intellectual attainment.” Towering before him, fired with righteous indignation, dark with fierce determination, trained to the minute by a life-time devotion to principle, rugged of body as of soul, the son of the pioneer advanced upon him, champion of all the weak and downtrodden and enslaved of the world.

Lincoln knew Douglas to be an orator of winning personality, spontaneous in declamation, passionate in invective, lightning in attack, excelling in impromptu reply. He knew him to be quick to seize upon the weakness in an opponent's

argument, adroit at making the most of the strength of his own, expert in all the wiles and strategies of controversy, unscrupulous about employing them to confound an adversary or mislead his hearers, the best offhand debater in the Senate during one of its most brilliant epochs. Sumner, Seward, Chase, Everett, Crittenden, Trumbull, Fessenden, Hale, Wilson-Douglas had measured swords with them all and rarely had he retired vanquished. He had gained an almost unbroken record of forensic victories. Swollen with the pride of achievement, recognizing no will but his own, he had come to look upon opposition of any kind with ill-controlled passion. Twelve years in the Senate had led him to regard his seat as peculiarly his own. Such was the man who, in the summer of 1858, Lincoln challenged to debate for his place, not only in the Senate, but for his place as a leader in the Nation.

Lincoln did not overestimate his own abilities to grapple in a final encounter with the man he had pursued so persistently. Not long before he had made admission of how wide a gap lay between them, in a pathetic contrast, and to his own disparagement.

"Twenty-two years ago," he said, "Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then-he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious—I, perhaps, quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure-a flat failure; with him, it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the Nation, and is not unknown in foreign lands.”

Speaking on another occasion of his opponent's more dangerous qualities, Lincoln said: "It is impossible to get the advantage of him. Even if he is worsted, he so bears himself that the people are bewildered and uncertain as to who has the better of it."

The impossible, then, was what Lincoln was about to undertake.

Nor did Douglas profess to despise the prowess of the man who had "stepped" into the arena to confront him. When informed at the Capitol by a dispatch that the man who had so persistently opposed him in minor contests had been chosen to run against him for the Senate, he said to the group of Republican representatives gathered about him to hear it read, "Well, gentlemen, you have nominated a very able and honest man.'

At another time he voiced a more vigorous as well as more characteristic opinion: "Of all the damned Whig rascals about Springfield, Abe Lincoln is the ablest and the most honest."

The contest could no longer be delayed. Douglas rushed from the Capital to Chicago where he made his first attack. His personal following in that city was tremendous. It was on July 9th. He was given a reception fit for an emperor. Crowds blocked the way to the station. He was driven to the Tremont House in a coach drawn by six horses. Banners, bands of music, cannon and fireworks added their various inspiration to the scene. He spoke that night from the balcony of the hotel to an immense audience. In the crowd stood Lincoln: silent, dark, imperturbable. There were other speeches over the State by both candidates. Enthusiasm was at fever heat. Douglas upheld his "popular sovereignty" dogma. Lincoln covered a much wider field, proclaiming everywhere the rights of man, but always aiming blows at Douglas as the exponent of all that was dangerous and fateful to the perpetuation of the Union.

But Lincoln's nature rebelled at this long distance sparring. He wanted close contact, to combat his skillful oppon

ent face to face, where the blows received and delivered could be witnessed and the force of their impact judged at the moment of exchange. On the 24th of July he sent a direct challenge to Douglas for joint debate. On the 30th, Douglas finally accepted the proposition to "divide time, and address the same audiences," naming seven different places, one in each Congressional District, outside of Chicago and Springfield, for the meetings.

The places and dates were: Ottawa, August 21; Freeport, August 27; Jonesboro, September 15; Charleston, September 18; Galesburg, October 7; Quincy, October 13; and Alton, October 15.

"I agree to your suggestion," wrote Douglas, "that we shall alternately open and close the discussion. I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply, occupying an hour and a half, and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport you shall open the discussion and speak for one hour, I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for half an hour. We will alternate in like manner in each successive place."

To this agreement Lincoln gave his consent, "Although," he wrote, "by the terms as you propose you take four openings and closes to my three."

The blows these giants gave and received can only be appreciated by a thorough study of the speeches. They drew such audiences as were never assembled before or since on such occasions. Their partisans were in a continual frenzy of passion.

"Never before nor since," says Alonzo Rothschild in his Work on Lincoln, "have two citizens engaged in a series of public discussions which involved questions of equal importance. Personal and purely local differences were over

shadowed from the very beginning by what the disputants had to say on issues so momentous that they were destined, within a few years, to plunge the country into Civil War. That Lincoln felt the premonition of the coming tragedy, might be gathered from his reference to it in the Quincy debate as 'successive acts of a drama to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like his, but in the face of the Nation, and to some extent, in the face of the world."

Contest memorable! Over the arena of the Illinois prairies they strove. Now Douglas appeared to prevail, now Lincoln. One page of those two hundred and sixty-three pages in which the debates have been preserved, persuades us that slavery is constitutional, and that each commonwealth should be allowed to have the "institution" or not, as it elects. Turn a leaf and we are convinced that slavery is wrong, and ought, at least, to be restricted.

Douglas began the debate by treating Lincoln in a jaunty manner, in talking down to him, patronizing him. Sometimes these personal pleasantries carried scarcely concealed sarcasm; sometimes they were merely feints to get out of corners into which the merciless logic of Lincoln had driven him. But the oftener they met the more direct were the blows delivered by Lincoln, arguing, not for himself, but for the eternal right.

Throughout their earlier debates Douglas, with the artfulness of which he knew no peer, misrepresented Lincoln's career and misstated his principles, in such a way as to put Lincoln on the defensive. In the first encounter, advantage appeared to rest with the Little Giant. But at the Ottawa meeting, the second on the schedule and where Lincoln had the closing argument, the Champion of the Republicans so beat and cornered and flayed his antagonist that when he