In his Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside Their Rivalry to Save the Nation, Edward Robert McClelland has written an engaging and enlivening narrative of the political rivalry between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. McClelland relates the oft-told story well and draws on period newspapers, excellent source material typically neglected, to flesh out the political combat, beginning his narrative in 1858 on the cusp of the seven debates, following with the little-known Ohio campaign of 1859 in which both Lincoln and Douglas parachuted in for speeches and rallies while not facing each other, then the campaign of 1860 and secession winter and war. A perceptive chronicler, McClelland offers a compelling portrait of two political titans at the height of their powers competing as the country's nihilistic Southern white supremacists plunged it into a destructive civil war.McClelland placed great emphasis on Douglas's efforts to stave off disunion from October 1860, when the first state elections revealed he would lose the presidential contest, to his death in June 1861. We follow Douglas over secession winter as he tries to broker a last-minute compromise with aged former Whig John J. Crittenden, the man who betrayed Lincoln in the 1858 Senate contest by endorsing Douglas and thereby greatly helping him carry the Old Whig swing vote in the center of the state. Douglas's behavior in this period is characterized as noble compared to recent presidents (i.e., Donald Trump) who refused to accept defeat. Yet while Douglas's conduct in what were, unbeknownst to him, the last months of his life is deserving of praise, that approbation must be tempered by his repeated rash and poor decisions and perpetual race baiting. Douglas started the sectional crisis that ended in war with his incredibly unfortunate 1854 decision to repeal the Missouri Compromise restriction on the expansion of slavery. That legislation, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, splintered the Democratic Party, strengthened its increasingly extremist Southern faction, created an anti-Nebraska coalition that matured into a sectional political organization, the Republican Party, and prompted a mini civil war in Kansas, a bloodletting that further radicalized the abolitionist John Brown and set him on a path to the Harpers Ferry Raid. Compounding his legislative disaster, Douglas smeared the new political party as the Black Republican Party, publicly dismissed the natural rights affirmations of the Declaration of Independence, excluding Black Americans, and creating an image of the Republicans and of Lincoln as favoring Black social and political equality, a depiction that was never true. In his 1858 debates with Lincoln, described here, Douglas used the most vulgar racist language to tie Lincoln to the abolition movement and play to the lowest sentiments of whites in anti-Black Illinois. Yet McClelland implausibly argued that Douglas was never personal in the contest. “Throughout the campaign, he (Douglas) was much more likely to compliment Lincoln, both on the stump and in person, than vice versa” (p. 39), McClelland wrote. Douglas also called Lincoln a drunken ruffian, a gambler, a traitor for his criticism of the Mexican War, and an abolitionist. Even during the secession winter, while pursuing compromise in the one honorable moment of his life, Douglas struggled to rein in his partisan invective, blaming the Republicans for the sectional crisis, arguing that they purposely brought it on to destroy slavery in the South, thereby undercutting his own self-proclaimed compromise efforts. The simple truth is that even with his work in the secession winter, and his support for the Union and Lincoln after the attack on Fort Sumter, in his heart, Stephen A. Douglas remained an unrelenting partisan to the end.
Dan Monroe (Thu,) studied this question.