Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[H]ow to explain the improbable career of former President Abraham Lincoln? Forget the dirt-floored log cabin and riverboat stuff. How, in the course of a decade and a half, did an Illinois lawyer win a seat in the U.S. House, serve one term, lose a U.S. Senate race and then become arguably the country’s greatest president? Maybe part of the answer was the quality of his rivals. If you believe having clever antagonists forces you to become smarter, then Vermont can take some small pride in the leader Lincoln became.
During his years in politics, Lincoln was dogged by innumerable challengers, and not just from the South. Two native Vermonters were among his most ardent critics. Congressmen Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stevens played opposing roles in Lincoln’s life. Douglas, a Democrat and his main rival, argued that he went too far for African-Americans; Stevens, a Republican, like Lincoln, was perhaps his harshest scold and complained he did not go far enough.
When Stephen Douglas made a presidential campaign tour through Vermont in 1860, it was the first time he had seen his home state in a long time. It was, in fact, only the second time he had returned since leaving at the age of 18. The other visit had come nine years earlier when Middlebury College had given him an honorary doctorate. On that occasion, Douglas had made the impolitic comment recalled ever since that “Vermont was a good state to be born in, provided you emigrate while young.”
As insulting as the comment was to Vermonters, here was Douglas returning from his adopted home of Illinois as living proof of his admonition. Douglas was one of most prominent American politicians of the day. Of the four men running for president that year, he was the most famous–far better-known certainly than his fellow Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln.
If Lincoln was just becoming known to the rest of the country, he was no mystery to Douglas. Two years earlier, the two had held a celebrated series of debates across Illinois. Their passionate arguments over whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the growing country’s new territories drew national interest. Douglas took the position he had taken in the U.S. Senate, where he had pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left it up to the people of each new territory to decide whether they would allow slavery. Any qualms Douglas might have had about slavery–and it’s not clear he had any–were outweighed by his desire for compromise to prevent Southern secession.
Lincoln took the opposite tack in the debate, arguing that any expansion of slavery was immoral. That ignoble institution must be checked and allowed to die over time. The new law, he said, meant “that we have no longer a choice between freedom and slavery–that both are equal to us–that we yield our territories as readily to one as the other.”
Before the first debate, Lincoln complained to a friend that Douglas “is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainly at no distant day to be President. …On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President.” After the debates, which secured Douglas’ re-election to the Senate, a friend consoled Lincoln by telling him that at least some of Douglas’ fame had rubbed of on him.
Now, as Douglas toured Vermont, he was certain that Lincoln would be the next president. Douglas was concerned about more than just the prospect of losing, however. He worried that Lincoln’s election would split the country just like the gangly candidate had split rails.
Southern Democrats had broken off from the party and nominated their own presidential candidate, thus assuring Lincoln’s victory against a divided opposition. Douglas was determined to keep the Northern Democrats viable by making a good showing.
Douglas said he was making the trip for personal reasons–to visit his hometown of Brandon and his father’s grave–but he found time to make a series of speeches in places like Burlington, Montpelier, Rutland, Brandon and Middlebury (where he’d first been drawn to politics as a young cabinetmaker energized by the common-man message of Democrat Andrew Jackson).
Douglas’ speeches drew huge crowds. Three thousand people turned out to hear him talk in Brandon, which at the time had a population of 3,000. Another 5,000 greeted his arrival in Middlebury.
But Douglas was not preaching to the choir–far from it. In truth, Vermont was a stronghold of the new Republican Party. Douglas himself conceded that his home state and Massachusetts were the two places he was most certain would not vote for him.
Vermonters turned out and cheered him anyway. Apparently they accepted Douglas’ explanation of his “great place to born in” comment. He had emigrated from Vermont because society here was too established. Only in the tentative world he found to the West could he, as a political newcomer, have risen so quickly. Indeed, he was 47 when he made the trip and had been in politics for the past 25 years, 13 of them in the U.S. Senate.
Vermont Republicans had another reason for accepting Douglas with such warmth. As the Rutland Herald stated, the state GOP having “a majority, which under no circumstances can be blotted out, we can well afford to be generous to our opponents.”
Douglas’ premonitions of political doom proved prescient. Lincoln won the election. Nowhere did he fare better than in Vermont, where he took 76% of the vote. Douglas managed only 19% in the state of his birth.
But he didn’t prove a sore loser. Douglas worked feverishly to mend the sectional rift signaled by his challenger’s victory. However, he wouldn’t live through the first year of the war he had long ago foreseen. Douglas died of typhoid fever he contracted while trying to convince Midwestern and border state to support the Union cause.
If Douglas took what was then a more moderate approach to the issue of slavery, Thaddeus Stevens most certainly did not. Stevens was a firebrand of the type that earned those like him the label of Radical Republicans. While Douglas thought of the practical political implications of being hard on the South, Stevens thought of the moral implications of being soft on slavery.
Like Douglas, Stevens had found success only after leaving Vermont. Stevens was a generation older than Douglas, having been born in Danville in 1792. (Douglas wasn’t born until 1813.)
Childhood was difficult for Stevens, who was born with a clubfoot for which he was often teased by other children. He made up for his physical challenge by developing his natural intellect. After attending the Caledonia County Grammar School in Peacham, Stevens entered Dartmouth College. He then studied briefly at the University of Vermont, which he left when the U.S. Army took over the campus during the War of 1812, and not because of a gruesome college “prank” he participated in involving a wayward cow and an axe. Stevens returned to Dartmouth and earned his degree in 1814. Soon afterward he followed a friend south to Pennsylvania, where he eventually established a successful law practice in Gettysburg.
Unlike Douglas, Stevens didn’t make it to Washington until later in life. He was 58 when he first entered the U.S. House. Once there, he fought against what he saw as morally bankrupt legislation like Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Though a Republican, Stevens also became one of Lincoln’s toughest critics. He and other Radical Republicans badgered the president early in the war to end slavery and let former slaves enlist in the Army as a way of crushing the Confederacy. (Not surprisingly, after the war, Stevens would call for harsh treatment of Southern states during the post-war Reconstruction era and help push through the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, who tried to block those efforts.)
Stevens had little tolerance for people who tolerated slavery, and he was not one to hold his tongue. He once called Lincoln’s predecessor, President James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, “a bloated mass of political putridity.”
Despite his dour appearance, Stevens had a sense of humor. When he was accused of supporting John Brown and his raid on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Stevens said he rejected Brown’s fanatical approach. “John Brown deserved to be hung for being a hopeless fool,” he said. “He attempted to capture Virginia with 17 men, when he ought to have known that it would require at least 25.”
For all his moralistic attitudes and outbursts of dark humor, Stevens was a political force in Washington. He helped push through a ban on slavery in the District of Columbia and maintained pressure on Lincoln to prohibit it everywhere else in the country.
One day in 1862, Lincoln complained to an advisor that Stevens and two other Radical Republicans kept hounding him to issue an emancipation proclamation. Just then, Lincoln looked out the window and saw the three men walking up the street toward the White House. Lincoln joked that he felt like the boy who kept getting beaten by his schoolmaster for mispronouncing the names of several biblical characters, and being forced to read the passage again–“Look there,” said the boy, pointing out the troublesome verse, “here comes them same damned fellows again.”
As much of a pest as Stevens could be to Lincoln, he also provided the president something essential: political cover and courage. By staking out what was then an extreme position, Stevens allowed the president to seem moderate in comparison. By the fall of 1862, Lincoln had come to agree with Stevens that the time was right to end slavery. The president and the people had finally caught up with where Stevens had been all along.
Writing of Stevens, historian Fawn Brodie said that he was “one of the most revolutionary and controversial of all American statesmen. His impact on the nation was more profound than that of any of his contemporaries, save Lincoln.”