Words Worth Remembering: Lincoln’s Stand in Alton
They were much alike. “History furnishes few characters whose lives and careers were so nearly parallels as those of Lincoln and Douglas,” Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, William Henry Herndon, wrote in 1889.
Still, they were much different in other ways. Stephen Douglas was the shorter man at around five feet four inches tall and was a good degree heavier. Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, was tall and trim. “He was lean in flesh and ungainly in figure,” Herndon described. “Aside from the sad, pained look due to habitual melancholy, his face had no characteristic or fixed expression.”
There was another, more memorable difference between the two men, and it was, in a very real sense, the barbed dividing line that ran through the center of the American soul: slavery.
Douglas’s position, as Herndon wrote, “was one of indifference.” He championed popular sovereignty, which though in name seemed democratic, was in practice was everything but: as Lincoln defined it, “if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man has a right to object.”
Such was the irony of a kind of democratic despotism that angered Lincoln, birthed open war in the Kansas territory, and pushed rather than nudged the nation ever closer to its climactic civil war of principle and purpose.
The slavery issue was front and center in the seven senatorial campaign debates between Lincoln and Douglas in the early fall of 1858, spanning several stops from Ottawa to Alton, Illinois. In each debate, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in a fierce battle over slavery in America.
Early on, in the first debate in Ottawa on August 21, Douglas made his position clear. “I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended for the Negro to be the equal of the white man,” he said. “He belongs to an inferior race, and must always occupy an inferior position.”
Whether a state or territory wanted slavery or didn’t want slavery was a decision to be theirs alone (such was the policy of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, signed in 1854, which brought Lincoln back into politics).
Douglas also supported Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, handed down 7-2 on March 6, 1857, which ruled that Black people could not be citizens.
Further, Taney wrote that the founding fathers never intended for freedom to extend to a people “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
To Lincoln, slavery was always a wrong, a dreadful thing that the founders made a bargain with the intention of the institution dying out in the first few decades of the nation under the Constitution.
Instead, it grew. And people like Taney and Douglas, following the Deep South’s lead, “have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery.”
The issue was moral at its core. “When he invites any people willing to have slavery to establish it,” Lincoln said of Douglas in Ottawa, “he is blowing out the moral lights around us,” at once “penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American people.” It was, in sum, a total retraction and abandonment of the American ideals.
In Alton, Illinois, on Friday, October 15, Lincoln made his greatest—and most piercing—stand on the slavery issue to date. Behind all the political and legal and social arguments lay a fundamental, inward disagreement, he said.
“The real issue in this country—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong,” Lincoln said.
“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. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.”
Lincoln concluded, “No matter 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, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
Less than a century later, the eternal struggle continued—marked, as Lincoln warned, by the reappearance of an old tyrannical principle in a different shape. “The Negro race is an inferior race,” Mississippi’s James Eastland declared in the Senate in June 1945. “The doctrine of white supremacy is one which, if adhered to, will save America.”
The civil rights movement revealed just how prescient Lincoln’s analysis was in Alton in the October days of 1858. The struggle to defend and realize the American ideals, as John Lewis always said, “is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year—it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
To be American, as Amanda Gorman explained through poetry at the 59th presidential inauguration in January 2021, is to come to terms with the timeless truth that our history confirms: “Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed / a nation that isn’t broken / but simply unfinished.”
Lincoln understood in Alton that America was not broken; her promises were simply waiting to be fulfilled. And that fulfillment would not come from passivity but action and struggle.
In the end, Lincoln knew that what makes America exceptional is not who we are—our accent, the color of our skin, the blood we bleed—but what we choose. America is not a state of being. If it were, we never would have come so far. America is instead a state of becoming.
And in this state of becoming, Lincoln’s stand in Alton, Illinois, clarified for a nation the choice before them: between right and wrong, fulfillment or abandonment, courage or cowardice.
In many ways, it is the choice before us even now.