The little men behind the curtain: the committees, connectors, and carpenters who made the Lincoln-Douglas debates happen.

• Author: Guelzo, Allen C.
• Position: Report

"In ordinary times," wrote Samuel P. Bowles' Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, in June, 1858, "the force of party machinery is all-powerful in this country,--defying even the assaults of its architects." It was the great disgrace of American politics that it had degenerated by the 1850s into "the rule of party as against both men and principles." In campaign after campaign, "the [news]papers and leaders that constitute this machinery exhibit a bitterness of spirit towards all who differ with their policy that shows how determined is their purpose." In that respect, Samuel Bowles, who "hated the rule of party almost as heartily as he hated negro slavery," could easily have served as clinching proof of the most contentious of recent interpretations of popular American politics in the 19th century, that of Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, whose Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (1) insists that American politics was really governed by small cadres of party elites. Even though large numbers of Americans were involved in voting and political meetings, Altschuler and Blumin argue, their involvement was only for the sake of the show. Americans were actually "skeptical and indifferent" about politics, and their "involvement" in popular democracy was characterized by "engaged disbelief." (2) Actually, Altschuler and Blumin are only the latest in a chorus of voices stretching back through the Progressive historians, who have handled, often with irritated skepticism, the notion that the American political parties have ever really served the interests of the American people. At their best, the parties served as vehicles for manipulating ethnic and cultural allegiances; at their worst, they allowed party hacks to stage-manage a show of democratic participation, while the people enjoyed the circus. Samuel Bowles would have loved it. (3)

Of course, skepticism about how democratic democracy really is, is always likely to flourish in a national climate of skepticism about the efficacy of government, and it flourishes best of all in the minds of those who lose elections and can find no better explanation for their loss than that democracy itself has gone to the dogs. But transferring that skepticism to 19th century political history is a risky venture. First, as Mark Neely has argued in criticizing Altschuler and Blumin, the idea that "the activities of election constituted an anomaly, an interruption in family and workaday lives," is an implicit criticism of democracy itself, adding for good measure a dash of contempt for the political aptitude of the mass of 19th century Americans, and thus suggesting that either the people or the democracy itself are incapable of sustaining genuine popular government. Second, Altschuler and Blumin's skepticism functions almost entirely on an either/or basis--either there was total popular engagement, or else it was total contrivance--something which, as Michael D. Pierson was at pains to point out in 2002, excludes the practical reality that 19th-century politics could "be both planned and genuinely enthusiastic." (4) But the third rock on which this skepticism about broad-based political participation founders is surely the Lincoln-Douglas senatorial campaign of 1858, and the seven great debates which form its core. For if any political event in the 19th century spoke directly to broad-based engagement and popular political agency on the part of the electorate, it was Illinois in the summer and fall of the very year the Springfield Republican made its complaint. As Richard Carwardine has written, "The Lincoln-Douglas contest of 1858 brilliantly revealed the extraordinary appetite of the Illinois public for democratic engagement" and demonstrated "a remarkable example of sustained participatory politics." (5)

That engagement, however, was a complex one, for what a grass-roots analysis of the Lincoln-Douglas campaign shows is a constant shuttling of power and control back-and-forth between the political public and the structures of party, and sometimes even between structures within the parties. It also shows how political engagement could take a number of forms, at a number of levels. It is easy to imagine the Lincoln-Douglas contest as a boxing match between the two principals, as though Lincoln and Douglas were the sole actors, and all the rest of the world an audience. But even a moment's reflection on a professional boxing match will remind us of the myriad demands such an event makes--there are managers to be solicited, schedules to be matched, arenas to be leased, people from trainers to ushers to be hired, broadcasters to be hooked-up. If Lincoln and Douglas materialize in our imaginations as the Great Oz on the platform, there needed to be regiments of little men behind the curtain--from contractors and carpenters to conventions and committee-men--who were absolutely indispensable to the image of authority and concern each candidate needed to project. And in 1858, they provided a climate of engagement which was not only popular, but very nearly frantic. "In the political world," wrote the journalist Edwin L. Godkin in the summer of 1858, "everybody's attention is absorbed by the canvass for the Illinois election in the autumn." (6)

CREATING THE CANDIDATE

Creating a candidate in 1858 began with a convention--or rather, multiple conventions, since Illinois was divided and subdivided politically into municipalities, counties (100 of them in 1858), state House districts (58 of them), state Senate districts (25 of these), and nine federal Congressional districts, some of which overlapped the others, and all of which relied on conventions to designate candidates. The convention system had come late to American politics--up until the 1830s, candidates for offices had either been self-nominated, singled out by newspaper editors who acted on behalf of the party leadership, or selected by caucuses of party colleagues at the same level (municipal, county, state or federal). The convention system, by contrast, was built up from below by a pyramid of local conventions, which sent delegates to the next level of conventioneering, and then from these dispatched another set of delegates to a state convention and a national party convention. "Each Congressional District," ran one circular of instructions, was to hold a District Convention on or before the first Monday of May next, to be composed of a number of delegates from each county equal to double the number of its Representatives in the General Assembly, provided each county shall have at least one delegate. Said delegates to be chosen by primary meetings ... at such times and places as they in their respective counties may see fit. Said District Conventions, each, to nominate one candidate for Congress, and one delegate to a National Convention, for the purpose of nominating candidates for President and Vice President of the United States. The seven delegates so nominated to a National Convention, to have power to add two delegates to their own number, and to fill all vacancies.

It was never entirely clear whether the convention system meant greater or lesser control by the party leaders over the nominations process. Conventions were billed by Andrew Jackson's Democrats as a significant step toward putting nominations on a more popular basis. The veteran New York politician, Chauncey Depew, thought the convention system made for greater openness of participation: "The belief that they are generally boss-governed is a mistake," because the boss is compelled by the convention system to consult "with the strongest men there are in the convention before he arrives at a decision" and often finds "his own judgment ... modified and frequently changed in these conferences." But the convention system was resisted by principled Whigs as an insidious device for whipping the party faithful into line behind carefully vetted candidates; and the best evidence of that for Illinois Whigs was Stephen A. Douglas, who exerted so much personal control over the Illinois Democratic party and its conventions that, as the Chicago American...