Lincoln and Douglas by Allen C. Guelzo

Author:Allen C. Guelzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The debate at Charleston marked the end of the third phase of the Lincoln-Douglas campaigns, as well as the end of the only swing either candidate would bother to make into southern Illinois. With just a little over six weeks left before election day in November, Lincoln and Douglas would turn their energies entirely toward crisscrossing the broad western angle of the Whig Belt. The three remaining debates—at Galesburg, Quincy and Alton—all lay within this western angle and would form “the real battleground” on which the last two phases of the campaigns would be fought. 26

Charleston, however, did not mark anything close to the end of the edginess the two campaigns were showing. Sheahan’s Chicago Times whooped with delight when a religious newspaper in Chicago, the Congregational Herald, chastised Lincoln for trying to discount the race card at Charleston. The Congregational Herald was the house organ of New England’s midwestern diaspora in the 1840s and ’50s, and it irritably condemned Lincoln’s decision at Charleston to make “color and race the ground of political proscription. He forsook principle, and planted himself on low prejudice!’ Henry Villard smirked in his dispatches to the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung over Lincoln’s volte-face: “The entire Republican press of Chicago took up this declaration, and the Negro had no stauncher advocate … than Lincoln…. Now, the same Lincoln declared, that the Negro, ‘created as a race inferior to White by the Lord Almighty’ must remain in his condition.” 27

The Republican press was less worried about the fevered brows of émigré abolitionists and more about the rumors which were circulating about Douglas’s cozy relationship with the Illinois Central Railroad. “It is a well-known fact that Mr. Douglas claims to be the father of the Illinois Central Railroad” and “that he is a pet of the Company,” complained a Republican newspaper. The contrast between Douglas’s palace car and the flatcar with its cannon, and Lincoln catching rides in ordinary passenger cars and, sometimes, cabooses, shortened Republican tempers and lengthened the reach of Republican suspicions. “During the present canvass the company have given [Douglas] a special car to himself,” raged the same newspaper. “In this car he carries his provisions, liquors, &c, and if we are not misinformed, the company furnishes him with servants.” Henry Clay Whitney, however, could not persuade an Illinois Central conductor even to unlock an empty car “hitched on to the rear of the train” as they were headed to Charleston, so that Lincoln could get some peace and quiet. “The conductor refused,” and from that moment, Whitney concluded that “every interest of that Road and every employee was against Lincoln and for Douglas.” Lincoln himself was growing irked enough with the Illinois Central’s behavior that, at a rally at Pekin on October 5, he accused the ICRR of providing Douglas “with special trains free of expense for the accommodation of himself and his famous cannon” and “an immense tract of land of the railroad company for so small a sum that a poor man would be enriched by the operation.

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