Product Description

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln was known as a successful Illinois lawyer who had achieved some prominence in state politics as a leader in the new Republican Party. Two years later, he was elected president and was on his way to becoming the greatest chief executive in American history.

What carried this one-term congressman from obscurity to fame was the campaign he mounted for the United States Senate against the country's most formidable politician, Stephen A. Douglas, in the summer and fall of 1858. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly in one of his greatest speeches -- "A house divided against itself cannot stand" -- and confronted Douglas on the questions of slavery and the inviolability of the Union in seven fierce debates. As this brilliant narrative by the prize-winning Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo dramatizes, Lincoln would emerge a predominant national figure, the leader of his party, the man who would bear the burden of the national confrontation.

Of course, the great issue between Lincoln and Douglas was slavery. Douglas was the champion of "popular sovereignty," of letting states and territories decide for themselves whether to legalize slavery. Lincoln drew a moral line, arguing that slavery was a violation both of natural law and of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. No majority could ever make slavery right, he argued.

Lincoln lost that Senate race to Douglas, though he came close to toppling the "Little Giant," whom almost everyone thought was unbeatable. Guelzo's Lincoln and Douglas brings alive their debates and this whole year of campaigns and underscores their centrality in the greatest conflict in American history.

The encounters between Lincoln and Douglas engage a key question in American political life: What is democracy's purpose? Is it to satisfy the desires of the majority? Or is it to achieve a just and moral public order? These were the real questions in 1858 that led to the Civil War. They remain questions for Americans today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36494 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Guelzo (Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America) gives us an astute, gracefully written account of the celebrated Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. These seven debates between two powerful attorneys and statesmen, Abraham Lincoln and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, starkly defined the stakes between sharply different positions on slavery and union on the eve of civil war and offered examples of serious, deeply reasoned exchanges of views rarely seen in American politics. As Guelzo wisely shows, the debates did not stand alone but were part of a larger Illinois senatorial campaign. Douglas won re-election that year, but Lincoln gained national recognition despite losing and then defeated Douglas three years later for the presidency. Perhaps more important, the views that Lincoln enunciated in 1858—that the government, heeding the majority's will, should halt slavery's further spread—laid the foundation for emancipation and a new era in the nation's history. Guelzo's smoothly narrated history of this segment of Lincoln's career, packed full of illustrative quotes from primary sources, will become a standard. (Feb.)
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CHAPTER 1

THE LEAST MAN I EVER SAW

Upon our platform there will standClad in judicial togaWith clinking hand-cuffs in his handAn old pro-slavery fogy,And first beside him on the boxIn attitude defiantLike frog that tried t'outswell the oxThere stands our Little Giant.And these two worthies shall engageIn a vehement tustleEach other from the platform's edgeBy lawful right to hustleDisplaying thus before our sightThe right to drive away thereWhat has itself an equal rightBy the same law to stay there.

H. P. H. Bromwell Papers,
Library of Congress

The Honorable Senator from Illinois, Stephen Arnold Douglas, began digging his political grave with the first item of business before the Senate of the United States on Wednesday, January 4, 1854. For a man approaching the height of his political powers, Senator Douglas did not look particularly uneasy, nor did the instrument he had in hand appear all that lethal. It was simply a "bill to organize the Territory of Nebraska," which Douglas was reporting out of the Senate Committee on Territories and laying before the entire Senate for its action. But it would be the undoing of Douglas all the same, and of the peace of the American Republic.

Ever since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson shrewdly bought up half the American West in the great Louisiana Purchase, Congress had been slowly organizing the immense landmass of "Louisiana" and setting up provisional governments there as territories -- Missouri in 1812, Arkansas in 1819, Iowa in 1838, Oregon in 1848, Minnesota in 1849. A territory was a legal halfway house between the moment when lands like the Louisiana Purchase were acquired by the United States, and the moment they could be admitted to the Union as full-fledged states. Under Article IV of the Constitution, Congress was responsible for setting up temporary governments in newly acquired lands, subdividing or fixing their boundaries, recognizing each of the new units as an incorporated territory, appointing territorial governors and supervising the creation of territorial legislatures and constitutions, and eventually, if territorial organization was successful, guiding a territory's application for statehood. This process stabilized the rule of law, allowed the people living there a measure of self-government, and created a test period before the territory was fully admitted to the Union as a state. Without it, land titles, law enforcement, incorporation, investment, and development would all hang fire.

The territorial process, however, was not necessarily rapid. By the time Minnesota was organized as a territory, in 1849, most of the immense bulk of the Louisiana Purchase, from the northern Rockies to the vast plains west of Nebraska, was still without territorial government. And then, in 1848, another expansion-minded president, James Knox Polk, used the Mexican War to acquire the great southwestern triangle of the continent, from the Rio Grande west to California and from Texas northwest to the Great Salt Lake. If the pace of territorial organization in the old Purchase lands was any indication, organizing the huge new American West could take another century.

No one felt the burden of pushing territorial organization in the West more urgently than Stephen A. Douglas, whose life up to this point read like a primer in the opportunities of western development. Douglas's forebears arrived in Rhode Island as early as the 1640s, but they gradually drifted north and west in search of new land, finally setting up on four hundred acres of land near Brandon, Vermont, in the 1790s. The Douglases acquired enough wealth and standing in Vermont to send Douglas's father to Middlebury College to become a physician, and the elder Douglas soon settled down to marriage and medicine in Brandon in 1811, followed by the birth of Stephen Arnold in 1813. Then, the bliss of the Douglas family abruptly stopped. In 1815, the doctor suffered a fatal heart attack. "I was only about two months old, and of course I cannot recollect him," Douglas wrote years afterward. But "I have often been told he was holding me in his arms when he departed this world." With the death of the senior Douglas died any prospect of Stephen following his father into a lucrative and respectable profession. Despite his "taste for reading" -- his favorite works were "those telling of the triumphs of Napoleon, the conquests of Alexander, and the wars of Caesar" -- and spending "night and Sundays in reading and study," the young Stephen Douglas was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker.

It was typical of Douglas that he at once began looking for a new way upward. He wheedled permission from his master to attend the Brandon Academy, and when his mother remarried in 1830 and moved to New York, young Stephen was given leave to enter the Canandaigua Academy and then, in 1833, to begin reading law with two local lawyers. But his stepfamily's money began to run dry, and the process of examination and admission to the bar in New York was long and expensive. In mid-1833, he embarked on yet another Douglas move westward, to Cleveland. "When shall we expect you to come home to visit us, my son?" pleaded his mother. "On my way to Congress, Mother," he replied.

The way to Congress appeared to be no easier for Douglas than the way to law. Cleveland was a professional dead end. Douglas hoped to find work in St. Louis, but St. Louis was already overstocked with lawyers, as were the Illinois towns on the other side of the Mississippi River. It was not until he walked into the middle of a public auction at Winchester, Illinois, in the fall of 1833 and volunteered his services to an auctioneer who needed somebody literate enough to keep track of sales that Douglas finally found himself earning two dollars a day -- as a clerk. This bounty gave him the bright idea of opening a school for clerks. In short order, Douglas had forty pupils and (at the end of the school quarter in March 1834) enough money to support him in a year's law study. Before the end of the year, Douglas was licensed to practice in Illinois and was the proprietor of his own one-man law practice. He was all of twenty-one years old.

Lawyering followed a short path to politics in Illinois, and never more so than in the volatile year of 1834. The President of the United States, the white-haired but iron-tempered hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, had thrown every ounce of his energies against the sucking of the American economy into the maw of the Industrial Revolution. Jackson was a devout old Jeffersonian Democrat -- which is to say that he saw American life in much the same terms as Thomas Jefferson had when Jefferson wrote that God's only chosen people were farmers on their own land. Democrats from Jefferson to Jackson looked uneasily on men who worked in shops for wages, since mere wage earners became dependent on the goodwill of wage payers and were vulnerable to political manipulation by their employers. They looked even more coldly on those who traded in bonds and securities (these were examples of imaginary wealth, whose value could be driven up and down without warning) or who made their living in merchandise and commerce (since they traded in fancy goods which no upstanding farmer really needed but which could trap him in a punitive cycle of debt and dependence). No man who did not own his own land, or who could not live from that land, could ever be truly free and independent.

This hostility led to political war in 1834 between Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States, the pumping station of the national financial system created by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s. Andrew Jackson was one of the few real heroes Americans could boast of in the disastrous War of 1812, and he had not defeated one enemy in scarlet coats only to concede to another in silver and gold. The Second Bank became, for Jackson and his allies, a monster with financial tentacles, seeking to reach into every corner of the Republic and entrap its virtuous farmers in paper chains of debt. When in 1834 the bank's president, Nicholas Biddle, challenged Jackson by seeking an early renewal of the bank's charter by Congress, Jackson vetoed the renewal legislation with all the vehemence with which he had bestowed gusts of grapeshot on the British.

All this should have been of little consequence to a novice lawyer in central Illinois in 1834. But when an attorney from Jacksonville stood up before a local club to which Stephen Douglas belonged and denounced Jackson's veto of the bank as tyrannical and treasonous, Douglas was furious at hearing America's premier military hero flogged verbally like a common bandit. "I could not remain silent when the old hero's character, public and private, was traduced, and his measures misrepresented and denounced," he recalled later, and in a trice, Douglas was on his feet making a speech of his own. A week later, an Illinois Democratic newspaper printed Douglas's speech in "two entire columns" and "for two or three successive weeks," and suddenly Douglas was a political celebrity. He was elected state's attorney for the First Judicial Circuit and then, in August 1836, won a seat in the state legislature. Seven months later, Andrew Jackson's successor in the presidency, Martin Van Buren, rewarded Douglas's faithful party service by appointing him register of the lucrative federal land office in Springfield. In 1838, Douglas ran for Congress on a platform which denounced corporate charters for "railroads, canals, insurance companies, hotel companies, steam mill companies &c., &c." as "unjust, impolitic, and unwise" -- and lost by a squeaker to John Todd Stuart. But in 1840, Douglas was back on the upward spiral when he was appointed by the Democratic governor Thomas Carlin to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Finally, in 1843, Douglas won the congressional seat he craved in a special election, defeating the formidable lawyer from the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Orville Hickman Browning. After he won reelection in 1846, the Illin...

Customer Reviews

Lincoln v. Douglas, 1858
This is an almost day by day account of how the 1858 campaign for US Senator from Illinois was conducted btween Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The author does a good job of putting you in the times and explaining the issues of the day. It is particularly strong in dealing with the pracical objections to Douglas' notion of popular soverignity in light of the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case.

The tight focus on the debates themselves was probably a tactical error on the author's part. They only had seven face-to-face debates and the book focuses entirely on them, with the result that by the 3rd or 4th debate, the events and the format of the book are repetitious.

Ironically, the author himself points out that it was the campaign,not just the debates that launched Lincoln toward the presidency, but the book itself only deals with the debates.

The Destruction of Senator Douglas
This book offers the debates in the context of the Illinois senatorial campaign of which they are a part. Guelzo narrates the events, analysing and explaining the strategy and tactics of both sides. The Republicans thought that they could upset Douglas, who was crippled in a number of ways.

President Buchanan had cut off Douglas's support from the normal party organization because Douglas had failed to back Buchanan's attempt to railroad the obviously fraudulent Lecompton constitution (which would have admitted Kansas to the Union as a slave state) through Congress. Buchanan cut off Douglas's patronage and largely replaced the Douglas men holding patronage jobs in Illinois (and elsewhere), leaving Douglas with campaign finance and organization problems.

Douglas was also under pressure because his opposition to Lecompton had cost him much of his support in the South and thus jeopardized his ambitions for the presidency in 1860. Douglas knew that Southerners would look carefully at his campaign positions in 1858, weighing them for acceptability to the South.

And those positions would be taken in the wake of the recently decided Dred Scott decision in which the U. S. Supreme Court stated that no territorial government could constitutionally limit slavery in the territory. There seemed to be no reason why this ruling would not logically also apply to the states, to the alarm of free states in the North. Dred Scott thus imperiled Douglas's cherished doctrine of popular sovreignty and further hampered his presidential ambitions by compromising him in both North and South.

Lincoln's campaign had its own problems. The Republicans were not only a new party but a clear minority in Illinois. The Democrats controlled the state legislature, and U. S. senators were then elected by the legislatures and not by direct popular vote. In 1858 Lincoln was a relatively little known figure outside party circles even in Illinois, and the election was in essence a series of contests to elect Republican legislators who would then vote in the legislature to elect Lincoln to the U. S. Senate. Lincoln was also aware that Douglas was coyly flirting with the national Republican party, where some of the senior leaders hoped to steal Douglas from the Democrats and possibly make him the party's presidential nominee in 1860. Lincoln felt that bringing Douglas to the party would hopelessly compromise the Republicans's opposition to the expansion of slavery, a founding principle of the party. He seems to have adjusted his strategy deliberately in order to prevent this from happening.

Guelzo relates the ins and outs of the campaign superbly. The story shows the brilliance of Abraham Lincoln as a practicing politician. People could and did argue who had won a particular debate, but overall Lincoln (though he narrowly lost the election) tied Douglas into knots. He forced Douglas to take positions that hurt him not only in Illinois but nationally, both North and South. As Guelzo makes clear, Lincoln's tactics probably destroyed any realistic hopes Douglas had for the presidency and thus all but destroyed him as a major national figure.

Amazingly it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for Douglas, who had to soldier on while watching his national ambitions wrecked by the unexpectedly capable Lincoln. Douglas was a prominent and successful speaker and politician and, though arrogant and pompous, was far from stupid. He had to realize what was happening. Certainly as the debates and the campaign went on, Douglas's performances became increasingly uneven and his drinking increased markedly. Many thought that Douglas was clearly alcohol impaired at a number of his later campaign speeches and at the late debates. Guelzo, indeed, seems to think that Douglas (who died in 1861) in part drank himself to death and that the process began here.

Lincoln fared differently, of course. He was first brought to national prominence by the debates, which were reported thoughout Illinois (with verbatim transcripts) and picked up by the national press of the day and publicized to intense interest throughout the country. This is one of the factors that led to the Cooper Union speech that many feel made Lincoln the Republican nominee in 1860.

My one problem with the book is that I am not sure that the debates quite live up to the subtitle of the book. First, it is very difficult to believe that Douglas, a consummate congressional politician rather than a profound thinker, had systematically created a philosophic position. It seems more likely that he formulated a simple formula (popular sovreignty) that would have at least superficial appeal both to North and South, be successful in Congress and not coincidently promote Douglas's own career and ambitions. He never explained the doctrine fully and clearly but kept it vague and tried to make it all things to all men. Douglas had great trouble responding to logical, constitutional and philosophic challenges such as those presented by Lincoln and by the U. S. Supreme Court through the Dred Scott case.

More important, though, is the fact that both Lincoln's and Douglas's positions had been around for a long time. Lincoln's view was that the laws of a free republic must ultimately be linked to basic, universal and overriding moral principles. This seems to be a variant of natural law theory, a long tradition in legal philosophy. Assuming that Douglas did have a coherent philosophic position, it was that any law made by a majority of the people through their representatives and by methods in accordance with due process was a proper law and beyond legal or moral challenge. This too is a long-standing theory. Indeed the Founders of 1789 were sufficiently aware of such ideas that they struggled to make the nascent Constitution proof against the "tyranny of the majority."

So the debates did not make new revelations. Guelzo is correct, I think, in his belief that the two positions constitute opposite ends of the spectrum and have been more or less in tension in the polity of the U. S. from the start to the present. But they were not first defined in the 1858 debates. Of course authors frequently do not determine the titles to their books, which are frequently titled by publishers in ways that will (they hope) get the book attention from potential reviewers and buyers. However this may be, the subtitle seems to me to overstate the case. The book itself is a wonderful evocation of the time and place and some of its great personalities in riveting action.

Informative
I'm really enjoying this book. I have read quite a bit about the debates and this text has several pieces on information I have not read before.